The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Razvan Cojocaru]

Hello all,

I'm 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:

https://github.com/razvan-cojocaru/libbdvmi

We hope that the community will find it useful, and welcome discussion
(the LibVMI authors in particular might find this interesting).

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.


Cheers,
Razvan

Re: The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Tamas K Lengyel]

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Hi Razvan,
thanks for open sourcing this project! It's great to see Bitdefender moving
in the OSS direction =) I've pinged the other LibVMI maintainers as well to
take a look. In summary, what do you see as the benefit in libbdvmi over
LibVMI?

Cheers,
Tamas

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:25 AM, Razvan Cojocaru <rcojocaru@bitdefender.com>
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm 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:
>
> https://github.com/razvan-cojocaru/libbdvmi
>
> We hope that the community will find it useful, and welcome discussion
> (the LibVMI authors in particular might find this interesting).
>
> 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.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Razvan
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-devel mailing list
> Xen-devel@lists.xen.org
> http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel
>

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Re: The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Razvan Cojocaru]

Hello Tamas,

> I've pinged the other LibVMI maintainers as well to take a look. In
> summary, what do you see as the benefit in libbdvmi over LibVMI?

Well, libbdvmi addresses a slightly different architectural problem: it
needs to provide a very efficient way of working with Xen to access
guest information in an OS-agnostic manner.

LibVMI's init functions are fed OS-dependent data obtained with external
Python tools, so that's one of the dependencies we don't need. In fact -
and this is an important part of our architecture - libbdvmi connects
the introspection logic component to Xen / the guest, and the
introspection logic component is the one that figures out what the guest
is and what to do with it, on the fly.

Libbdvmi also provides a xenstore-based way to know when a guest has
been started or stopped, which LibVMI didn't when I've last checked.

Another goal for libbdvmi has been to have as few external library
dependencies as possible, and it indeed only requires libxc,
libxenstore, and the C++ standard library. Where LibVMI has used glib
for caching, we've used only STL containers.

Then we needed to be able to simply map guest pages from userspace and
write directly to them, and LibVMI did not offer that. Of course, that
way we need to only map one page where LibVMI writes would possibly
touch several non-contiguous pages, but still it's a nice thing to have
generally, and almost a deal breaker in our case.

Last but not least, as you've seen, the Xen and userspace code has been
in quite a bit of flux, and being able to immediately modify the library
code to suit a new need, or to update the code for a new Xen version,
has been a bonus to the project's development pace.

We did start out trying to work with LibVMI, but at that time it didn't
do all that we needed it to do, and it did things we didn't require at
all (adding extra complexity) while requiring extra dependencies
(Python, glib). But, should the libbdvmi particulars ever be integrated
into LibVMI, that would of course be great.


Thanks,
Razvan

Re: The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Dario Faggioli]

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[Moving to publicity@, xen-devel@ on Bcc]

On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 10:04 +0300, Razvan Cojocaru wrote:
> Hello Tamas,
> 
> > I've pinged the other LibVMI maintainers as well to take a look. In
> > summary, what do you see as the benefit in libbdvmi over LibVMI?
> 
> Well, libbdvmi addresses a slightly different architectural problem: it
> needs to provide a very efficient way of working with Xen to access
> guest information in an OS-agnostic manner.
> 
> [snip]
>
This all sounds really interesting... Fancy writing a post for the Xen
Project blog?

I think it would make great content (and, but almost cut'n'paste this
very email I'm replying to, you have it almost written already! :-P).

The blog it's here, as I'm sure you know:
 https://blog.xenproject.org/

There has and there continue to be a fair amount of technical content.

If you're up for it, just say so, create an user on the blog itself, and
tell us what is that, and someone will make it possible for you to
actually write.

Once done, save the article as draft, and post the link here on this
list (publicity@lists.xenproject.org), for review.

Thanks and Regards,
Dario
-- 
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)

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Re: The Bitdefender virtual machine introspection library is now on GitHub

[Razvan Cojocaru]

Re-added xen-devel on Bcc (lost it in my reply yesterday).

On 07/28/2015 05:33 PM, Dario Faggioli wrote:
> [Moving to publicity@, xen-devel@ on Bcc]
> 
> On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 10:04 +0300, Razvan Cojocaru wrote:
>> Hello Tamas,
>>
>>> I've pinged the other LibVMI maintainers as well to take a look. In
>>> summary, what do you see as the benefit in libbdvmi over LibVMI?
>>
>> Well, libbdvmi addresses a slightly different architectural problem: it
>> needs to provide a very efficient way of working with Xen to access
>> guest information in an OS-agnostic manner.
>>
>> [snip]
>>
> This all sounds really interesting... Fancy writing a post for the Xen
> Project blog?
> 
> I think it would make great content (and, but almost cut'n'paste this
> very email I'm replying to, you have it almost written already! :-P).
> 
> The blog it's here, as I'm sure you know:
>  https://blog.xenproject.org/
> 
> There has and there continue to be a fair amount of technical content.
> 
> If you're up for it, just say so, create an user on the blog itself, and
> tell us what is that, and someone will make it possible for you to
> actually write.

Thanks, it's quite an honour to be asked! I've created a new user, my
username is 'rc'.

> Once done, save the article as draft, and post the link here on this
> list (publicity@lists.xenproject.org), for review.

Alright, will do!


Thank you,
Razvan