Use Vsock with Libzmq

blog.remijouan.net

49 points·remijouannet··9 comments

I could see this being really useful for people who need VM-Sandboxed software, but also need quick and dirty bridges between host/guest. Great contribution!

hi, i’ve recently contributed to libzmq by adding AF_VSOCK. if anyone is playing around with it

Been hoping for some time someone would write it better than my local ugly hack. This immediately useful. Thanks a bunch.

Preparing for the 10 years anniversary of Pieter Hintjens's disseapearance, the main author of Zeromq:

http://hintjens.com/blog:125

What are the typical use cases for the Guest VM to talk to Hypervisor? I see 2 use cases mentioned on the Proxmox link (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu-guest-agent)

1. shutdown the guest 2. freeze the guest system during backup/snapshot

Just curious about other possible use cases.

I think it would be useful for backup testing. Lots of VM backup software will boot a restored VM and screenshot the login screen. That’s useless IMO because you could be screenshotting an outdated restore without realizing.

I think you could boot a network disconnected VM and communicate over vsock to assess the guest health. You’d need an agent in the VM, but I think it'd be worth it.

some VMMs just straight up translate vsock from the guest to UDS on the host.

Building micromvs with no network support helps with isolation and (more) kernel surface reduction.

aws is using it for aws nitro enclave, one of the use case for vsock is communication between guests on the same host

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