This post introduces the project I worked on with Honeynet Project at Google Summer of Code this year. The project of TinyVMI is to port a library (LibVMI) into a tiny operating system (Mini-OS). After porting, LibVMI will have all its functionalities running inside a tiny virtual machine, which has a much smaller size as well as higher performance compared to the same library running on a Linux OS.

1. Milestone Goal: “Port input module and os support, event support, architecture support, and all examples of LibVMi into MiniOS” The goal of the second milestone is described in section 3.1.2 ~ 3.1.6 in the proposal to GSoC 2018. In brief, it includes a) reading configurations of target VM (libvmi.conf); b) parsing json files containing target VM; c) support introspecting both Linux and Windows virtual machines; d) architecture support for both x86 and arm; e) testing all examples of LibVMI in TinyVMI.

Xen Mini-OS is a minimal operating system designed to running on top of Xen hypervisor. To keep the kernel small, there are only few libraries shipped with it: newlib for C language library, Xen related library such as libxc to communicate with Xen hypervisor, and lwip for basic networking. To port LibVMI to Mini-OS, more libraries are needed. These include JSON libraries to parse Rekall profiles, and library with some utility data structures such as GLib.