My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container

November 2, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments

My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container Manco et al., SOSP’17 Can we have the improved isolation of VMs, with the efficiency of containers? In today’s paper choice the authors investigate the boundaries of Xen-based VM performance. They find and eliminate bottlenecks when launching large numbers of lightweight VMs (both unikernels and minimal ... Continue Reading

Deconstructing Xen

March 16, 2017November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Deconstructing Xen Shi et al., NDSS 2017 Unfortunately, one of the most widely-used hypervisors, Xen, is highly susceptible to attack because it employs a monolithic design (a single point of failure) and comprises a complex set of growing functionality including VM management, scheduling, instruction emulation, IPC (event channels), and memory management. As of v4.0, Xen ... Continue Reading

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures

February 19, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures - Popek & Goldberg 1974. With thanks to Alfred Bratterud for pointing me at this paper. What exactly is a virtual machine? What does a virtual machine monitor do? And how do we now whether a given piece of hardware can support virtualization or not? In today's paper ... Continue Reading

Cooking the Books: Formalizing the JMM Implementation Recipes

August 6, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Cooking the Books: Formalizing the JMM Implementation Recipes - Petri et al. 2015 A decade ago, the semantics of concurrent Java programs, the Java Memory Model (JMM), was revised and redefined... ... this refinement introduced a formalization called the Data-Race Free (DRF) guarantee. Programs that do not have data races (DRF) in their sequentially consistent ... Continue Reading

Jitsu: Just-in time summoning of unikernels

May 11, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Jitsu: Just-in time summoning of unikernels - Madhavapeddy et al. 2015 Last week saw the 12th USENIX symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '15), so the papers are now open access. I've been looking forward to bringing you today's choice for some time. Take the MirageOS work on unikernels, and the Xen port ... Continue Reading

One VM to Rule Them All

November 18, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

One VM to rule them all - Wuerthinger et al. 2013 Building high-performance virtual machines is hard , and a number of widely used languages only have lower-performance implementations. Wuerthinger et al. want to make it easier for you to create high-performance VMs without needing to create highly complex implementations. According to the paper: Java ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Virtualization