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

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.