Re: [libvirt] creating stream

So the extra "byte" (in fact 4 bytes) are at 0x0084-0x0087. So this is how strings are encoded. There are basically two types of strings when it comes to XDR. The first one is nonnull_string, which are encoded [length][string]. With just this it would be impossible to differentiate between NULL and an empty string "" as both would be encoded in the same way. Therefore, there is remote_string (libvirt terminology) or xdr_pointer (XDR terminology) which encodes a pointer as [bool][pointer] where bool is either 00 00 00 00 meaning the pointer is NULL or something else (e.g. 00 00 00 01) meaning the pointer has a non-NULL value. So long story short, what you can see here is: 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 07 73 65 72 69 61 6c 30 which is the same as (regroup) [00 00 00 01] [00 00 00 07] [73 65 72 69 61 6c 30] which means: the following pointer is a non-NULL pointer, and it is a string of the length 7 and the string is "serial0".