Antivirus on the Linux desktop (was ClamAv oddity)

[John Hupp]

On 12/11/2015 6:42 AM, Grizzly wrote:
> 11 December 2015  at 11:45, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Re: ClamAv oddity (at least in part)
>
> <snipped>
>   
>> Since avira is discontinued, you could test avast and what ever else
> I also have Avast (at least on Windowz) so that would be great, ClamAv is my
> second AV (check when Avast finds a threat) Clam has its problems, mainly when
> scanning Mail attachments (on demand) it's called again for each one ;-<) and
> lacks a BootScan option, on the good side the overhead is low (AFAIK)
>
> Avast IME is getting a bit resource hungry and the worst "features" cant be
> turned off ;-<)
>
> I will give aVast on Ubuntu a go though
>
>> might be available for Linux.

When I last looked at this (2/15), Avast for Linux was discontinued.

My interest was in uses calling for the extra assurance of on-access 
(resident) protection.  Some products had done this via the Dazuko file 
system module, but the Dazuko project is not currently maintained and 
won’t work on current kernels.  This may be why some Linux A/V are 
discontinued or no longer supported on current kernels.

The alternative to Dazuka seems to be redirFS.  It is no longer 
maintained, but at least in February still worked with current kernels.  
The redirFS web site also refers to an alternative: 
http://www.pluginfs.org, but that no longer exists.

It seemed to me that the only viable alternatives at that point were 
Comodo and AVG (both using the no-longer-maintained redirFS), though I 
noted that they had higher hardware requirements.

All-in-all, not a pretty state of affairs for resident A/V on the Linux 
desktop.  (Though there are some better solutions for Linux servers.)  
I'd be happy to find that someone has done a new survey and found better 
developments.  I'd even be happy to find that I'd drawn the wrong 
conclusions!