Hi all,
I wanted to add a few thoughts here, as this is clearly one of the harder tasks.
> On 27 Mar 2017, at 14:07, Felix Schmoll <eggi.innovati...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2017-03-26 15:04 GMT+02:00 Wei Liu <wei.l...@citrix.com
> <mailto:wei.l...@citrix.com>>:
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 01:33:08PM +0200, Felix Schmoll wrote:
> [...]
> > > So just one last time to be clear about this: You can't just ignore
> > interrupts and write all other edges to a shared memory region, like the
> > KCOV feature the syzkaller uses does,
>
> Yes, you can.
>
> Since you mention that, let's break things down a bit more.
>
> [snip]
>
> Feel free to speak your thought. This project is meant to be beneficial
> to both you and the Xen project. I would be quite delighted to hear your
> understanding of the project.
>
> Principally I would be fine with either the tracing or the prototype, I find
> it however much more difficult to imagine what successfully implementing the
> tracing would look like and how to write a good proposal that goes into
> specifics. Writing a proof-of-concept/prototype is easier in that regard as
> success would be just defined by "does it run".
I think there may be other possibilities to structure a proposal, e.g. a
prototype (or set of experiments) followed by a design and/or gap analysis that
could be community reviewed (and checked into our docs tree). We could also
build in a blog post (or similar). The challenge is to come up with a structure
that ensures that we make progress on understanding the problem space and that
you have something to show and refer to at the end of the project.
I am just throwing this in as a possibility, but obviously Wei would have to
agree with it.
> What I'm having in my mind right now is still a rather vague notion of how
> the tracing output looks like and an a bunch of ideas on what afl and
> syzkaller do, combined with huge gaps in how Xen "really" works. That will
> certainly start to clear up once I start really digging into it, but until
> then I have to rely mostly on your intuition in terms of what is realistic in
> what timeframe.
I would maybe suggest that you and Wei have a discussion on IRC to discuss the
pro's and con's of the two different approaches and to see what is realistic.
> Now if I have to decide between the two, I'd still prefer the tracing, since
> on the one hand being the author of a hypercall seems to be pretty cool, and
> on the other hand learning the actual contribution process and writing
> something ready for deployment seems much more valuable.
It is also worth noting that the contribution process for a design or similar
would be the same than for code (we tend to store such documents in [xen.git] /
docs ).
Hope that helped
Regards
Lars
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