Re: [Publicity] [Xen-devel] The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Razvan Cojocaru <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/29/2015 02:30 PM, Lars Kurth wrote:
> 
>> On 29 Jul 2015, at 11:36, Razvan Cojocaru <rcojocaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> On 07/29/2015 11:37 AM, Lars Kurth wrote:
>>>>> Once done, save the article as draft, and post the link here on this
>>>>> list (publicity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), for review.
>>>>
>>>> Alright, will do!
>>>
>>> Do you have an idea regarding timing? We have another post that is being 
>>> worked on, so I wanted to make sure that we don't publish the articles in 
>>> the same week
>>
>> I've saved the post to Drafts as instructed, here's the preview link:
>>
>> https://blog.xenproject.org/?p=10850&preview=true
>>
>> Please let me know how to proceed.
> 
> Thank you. We will wait for 1-2 days to get feedback, you may need to make 
> some modifications and then we agree on a publication date.
> 
> The title could maybe be made more interesting. Maybe Sarah has some ideas. 

Sorry, couldn't think of another title... Sure, if anyone has a better
idea I'm happy to change it.

>> We’re very happy to announce that the library we’ve created to help us 
>> perform virtual 
>> machine introspection is now on GitHub, under the LGPLv3 license, here. The 
>> library is 
>> x86-specific, and while there’s some #ifdeferry suggesting that the earliest 
>> supported 
>> version is Xen 4.3, only Xen 4.6 will work out-of-the-box with it.
> 
> I think you may need a little bit more introduction and context here. If 
> someone has not followed your work on xen-devel@ (and those of others in the 
> same area), it is not really clear what you refer to. Consequently a reader 
> may not get past the first paragraph.
> 
> Maybe start with some of your work in Xen and the primary use-case(s) within 
> VMI you are trying to solve before that paragraph. It is also OK to refer to 
> commercial products/presentations/etc. as long as the post doesn't become a 
> product pitch (which I don't think it would)

Understood.

>> While LibVMI is great, and has been considered for the task, it has slightly 
>> different design 
>> goals: for best results, the user needs to use external Python tools to 
>> extract guest information, 
> 
> I am assuming you refer to best results for LibVMI?

Yes. I'll clarify.

>> usesGlib for caching (which adds to client applications’ dependencies), and 
>> it doesn’t allow mapping 
>> of guest pages from userspace (so that we could write to them directly).
> 
>> Libbdvmi aims to provide a very efficient way of working with Xen to access 
>> guest information in an 
>> OS-agnostic manner:
> I would also mention Libbdvmi in the "We’re very happy to announce that th 
> ..." paragraph, such that 
> the name can be referenced. And than maybe say: "In contrast, Libbdvmi ..." 
> or something like it
> 
> On the bullet points you list: is it correct to say that Libbdvmi is more 
> tightly integrated with the recent VMI-Xen work (and Xen in general) and 
> smaller compared to LibVMI? 

I believe it is, yes, thank you for the suggestion.

> That may lead someone to raise the question why you are not trying to 
> upstream the functionality into LibVMI. You may want to tackle this upfront, 
> in particular because we moved from mem-access (Xen) to LibVMI (generic) and 
> now a more Xen specific variant. Not having followed this in detail, I was 
> also wondering whether Libbdvmi a complete re-write or based on LibVMI. 

Libbdvmi has been written from scratch using only libxenctrl and
xenstore. Actually, upstreaming this into LibVMI would be great, if
possible.

>> We hope that the community will find it useful, and welcome discussion!
> Concrete calls for action usually work better. You may want to make this more 
> concrete.  

Understood. Will come up with an updated draft.


Thanks,
Razvan

_______________________________________________
Publicity mailing list
Publicity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/publicity