Abhinand Palicherla
Donald E. Porter
ABSTRACT
Virtual machines (VMs) are an increasingly ubiquitous feature of modern computing, yet the interested student or professional has limited resources to learn how VMs work. In particular, there is a lack of "hands-on" exercises in constructing a virtual machine monitor (VMM, or hypervisor), which are both simple enough to understand completely but realistic enough to capture the practical challenges in using this technology. This paper describes a set of assignments to extend a small, pedagogical operating system (OS) to form a hypervisor and host itself. This pedagogical hypervisor, called HOSS, adds roughly 1,000 lines of code to the MIT JOS source, and includes a set of guided exercises. Initial results with HOSS in an upper-level virtualization course indicate that students enjoyed the assignments and were able to apply what they learned to solve different virtualization-related problems. HOSS is publicly available.
- AMD. AMD-V Nested Paging. White Paper, AMD: http://developer.amd.com/assets/NPT-WP-1/%201-final-TM.pdf, July 2008.Google Scholar
- AMD. AMD I/O Virtualization Technology (IOMMU) Specification Revision 1.26. White Paper, AMD: http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/34434-IOMMU-Rev_1.26_2-11-09.pdf, Nov 2009.Google Scholar
- C. L. Anderson and M. Nguyen. A survey of contemporary instructional operating systems for use in undergraduate courses. J. Comput. Sci. Coll., 21(1):183--190, Oct. 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Andrus, C. Dall, A. V. Hof, O. Laadan, and J. Nieh. Cells: A virtual mobile smartphone architecture. In SOSP, pages 173--187, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Andrus and J. Nieh. Teaching operating systems using android. In SIGCSE, pages 613--618, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Atkin and E. G. Sirer. Portos: An educational operating system for the post-pc environment. In SIGCSE, pages 116--120, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. Warfield. Xen and the art of virtualization. In SOSP, pages 164--177, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Bellard. Qemu, a fast and portable dynamic translator. In USENIX ATC, pages 41--41, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Ben-Yehuda, M. D. Day, Z. Dubitzky, M. Factor, N. Har'El, A. Gordon, A. Liguori, O. Wasserman, and B.-A. Yassour. The Turtles Project: Design and implementation of nested virtualization. In OSDI, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Brylow. An experimental laboratory environment for teaching embedded operating systems. In SIGCSE, pages 192--196, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Bugnion, S. Devine, M. Rosenblum, J. Sugerman, and E. Y. Wang. Bringing virtualization to the x86 architecture with the original VMware workstation. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., 30(4):12:1--12:51, Nov. 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Chisnall. The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor. Prentice Hall Press, 1st edition, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. A. Christopher, S. J. Procter, and T. E. Anderson. The nachos instructional operating system. In USENIX Winter Conference, pages 4--4, 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Cooper. Vmware android handset virtualization hands-on. Retrieved Sept. 1, 2014 from http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/15/vmware-android-handset-virtualization-hands-on/, 2011.Google Scholar
- R. Davoli and M. Goldweber. Virtual square (v2) in computer science education. In ITiCSE, pages 301--305, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Dinda. Eecs 441: Resource virtualization, winter 2014. Retrieved Sept. 1, 2014 from http://pdinda.org/virt-w14/.Google Scholar
- D. R. Engler, M. F. Kaashoek, and J. O'Toole, Jr. Exokernel: An operating system architecture for application-level resource management. In SOSP, pages 251--266, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Hess and P. Paulson. Linux kernel projects for an undergraduate operating systems course. In SIGCSE, pages 485--489, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. A. Holland, A. T. Lim, and M. I. Seltzer. A new instructional operating system. In SIGCSE, pages 111--115, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- JOS OS Lab. Retrieved Sept. 1, 2014 from http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828.Google Scholar
- M. Ketel. A virtualized environment for teaching IT/CS laboratories. In SE, pages 92:1--92:2, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- O. Laadan, J. Nieh, and N. Viennot. Teaching operating systems using virtual appliances and distributed version control. In SIGCSE, pages 480--484, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Lawson and L. Barnett. Using ipodlinux in an introductory os course. In SIGCSE, pages 182--186, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Liu, X. Chen, and Y. Gong. Babyos: A fresh start. In SIGCSE, pages 566--570, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Owens. Using virtualization to teach Linux system administration in online courses. In IBM ICVCI, 2007.Google Scholar
- PCI-SIG. Address translation services 1.1 specification. http://www.pcisig.com/members/downloads/specifications/iov/ats_r1.1_26Jan09.pdf.Google Scholar
- B. Pfaff, A. Romano, and G. Back. The pintos instructional operating system kernel. In SIGCSE, pages 453--457, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Russell. Lguest: The simple x86 hypervisor. Retrieved Sept. 1, 2014 from http://lguest.ozlabs.org.Google Scholar
- A. Silberschatz, P. B. Galvin, and G. Gagne. Operating System Concepts. 9th edition, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Smith and R. Nair. Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Sun, V. Katta, K. Krishna, and R. Sekar. V-NetLab: An approach for realizing logically isolated networks for security experiments. In CSET, pages 5:1--5:6, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. S. Tanenbaum. A unix clone with source code for operating systems courses. OSR, 21(1):20--29, Jan. 1987. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. S. Tanenbaum and H. Bos. Modern Operating Systems. 4th edition, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Uhlig, G. Neiger, D. Rodgers, A. L. Santoni, F. C. Martins, A. V. Anderson, S. M. Bennett, lain Kägi, F. H. Leung, and L. Smith. Intel virtualization technology. In IEEE Computer, pages 48--56, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Teaching Virtualization by Building a Hypervisor
Recommendations
Live gang migration of virtual machines
HPDC '11: Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computingThis paper addresses the problem of simultaneously migrating a group of co-located and live virtual machines (VMs), i.e, VMs executing on the same physical machine. We refer to such a mass simultaneous migration of active VMs as "live gang migration". ...
Virtio network paravirtualization driver
One of the techniques used to improve I/O performance of virtual machines is paravirtualization. Paravirtualized devices are intended to reduce the performance overhead on full virtualization where all hardware devices are emulated. The interface of a ...
Pre-Copy and post-copy VM live migration for memory intensive applications
Euro-Par'12: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Parallel processing workshopsVirtualization technology provides a means for server consolidation, reducing the number of physical servers required for running a given workload. Virtual Machine (VM) live migration facilitates the transfer of a running (VM) between physical hosts ...
Comments