CAREER: Beyond Virtual Hardware: VMM/OS Co-Design for Lightweight, Flexible Virtualization

虚拟化是一种越来越流行的策略，用户可以在另一个平台上运行为一个平台设计的应用程序——一次编写，随处运行的圣杯。对虚拟化的警告是，“任何地方”都必须是一个拥有多余资源的强大系统。在虚拟机中，用户可以将应用程序与其所有操作系统依赖项捆绑在一个易于迁移的环境中——只要用户愿意拖拽重复的网络堆栈、CPU调度程序、病毒扫描程序、交换启发式等等。为了减少这些冗余和开销，这个项目研究了操作系统的彻底重组。这个项目是由未来的愿景驱动的，每个应用程序和系统服务都在专用虚拟机中运行；此外，操作系统不再是运行在裸机硬件上的单个软件，而是将其功能分解为虚拟机监视器和未修改的应用程序之间的几个独立层。该项目调查了以前未研究过的应用程序和主机服务类别，以及用于硬件管理和存储的新系统层，最终目标是在移动设备上实现每个应用程序的虚拟机。如果成功，这项研究将建立对计算机系统设计中权衡的更丰富的科学理解，并显着提高现代计算机系统的效率和灵活性。

Virtualization is an increasingly popular strategy for users to run applications designed for one platform on another platform---the holy grail of write once, run anywhere. The caveat for virtualization is that 'anywhere' has to be a powerful system with resources to spare. In a virtual machine, users can bundle an application with all of its operating system dependences in an easily-migrated environment---as long as users are willing to drag along duplicate networking stacks, CPU schedulers, virus scanners, swapping heuristics, and so on. This project investigates a radical restructuring of the operating system in order to reduce these redundancies and overheads.This project is driven by a vision of the future where each application and system service runs in a dedicated virtual machine; moreover, the operating system is no longer a single piece of software running on bare hardware, but its functionality is decomposed into several independent layers between the virtual machine monitor and the unmodified application. This project investigates previously unstudied classes of applications and host services, as well as new system layers for hardware management and storage, with the end goal of making per-application virtual machines practical on mobile devices. If successful, this research will establish a richer scientific understanding of the trade-offs in computer system design and dramatically improve the efficiency and flexibility of modern computer systems.