2008 Proceeding- General Chair:
- David Gregg,
- Program Chairs:
- Vikram Adve,
- Brian Bershad
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE 08), in Seattle, USA. VEE is the premier venue for presenting and learning about new research on all aspects of virtualization, and we hope that strength will be further enhanced with this year's program.
VEE is a unique conference in that it brings together diverse elements of virtual machine research, most notably operating system (OS) virtualization and virtual machines for implementing programming languages (PL). Reflecting the broad scope of the community, VEE this year is being co-located with ASPLOS, a cross-disciplinary conference that spans PL, OS and architecture research. Although VEE has its roots in the PL community, since 2007 it has had two program chairs - one each from the OS and PL communities. This year, for the first time, half of the program committee comes from each of these two communities. Also for the first time, over 50% of the submitted papers (and about two-thirds of the accepted papers) fell in the broad area of OS virtualization.
A total of 57 papers were submitted to VEE this year. This number was lower than for VEE 2007, perhaps because there was a short gap of less than 7 months between the 2007 and 2008 submission deadlines, in order to co-locate VEE 2008 with ASPLOS (VEE 2007 was co-located with PLDI in June). An informal classification of the submissions by the program chairs showed about 31 on OS-virtualization, 25 on PL virtualization (two of which had a significant OS component), and one unrelated to virtualization. This was a significant change from last year, when about two-thirds of the submissions were PL-related. One possible reason is that OS virtualization has recently been growing fast as a field of research, driven in part by strong interest from industry.
The program committee met in person near Chicago's O'Hare airport for a full day to discuss the papers, except for two members who phoned in. Every paper was discussed at least briefly at the meeting. The decision for every paper but one had a clear consensus, an important goal we set beforehand, and the one case that required a vote was not a close call. Overall, 18 papers were accepted, an acceptance rate of 32%. The committee explicitly decided to select papers purely on their individual merits rather than to strive for a balanced program between the OS and PL areas. The result is that twelve of the selected papers are related to OS virtualization and six to PL virtualization.
Proceeding Downloads
Scheduling I/O in virtual machine monitors
This paper explores the relationship between domain scheduling in avirtual machine monitor (VMM) and I/O performance. Traditionally, VMM schedulers have focused on fairly sharing the processor resources among domains while leaving the scheduling of I/O ...
Inter-domain socket communications supporting high performance and full binary compatibility on Xen
Communication performance between two processes in their own domains on the same physical machine gets improved but it does not reach our expectation. This paper presents the design and implementation of high-performance inter-domain communication ...
Characterization & analysis of a server consolidation benchmark
Virtualization is already becoming ubiquitous in data centers for the consolidation of multiple workloads on a single platform. However, there are very few performance studies of server consolidation workloads in the literature. In this paper, our goal ...
Netchannel: a VMM-level mechanism for continuous, transparentdevice access during VM migration
Efficient and seamless access to I/O devices during VM migration coupled with the ability to dynamically change the mappings of virtual to physical devices are required in multiple settings, including blade-servers, datacenters, and even in home-based ...
Trace fragment selection within method-based JVMs
Java virtual machines have historically employed either a "wholemethod" or a "trace" methodology for selecting regions of code for optimization. Adaptive whole-method optimization primarily leverages intra-procedural optimizations derived from classic ...
A method specialisation and virtualised execution environment for Java
We present a virtualisation and method specialisation framework for Java that facilitates efficient, dynamic modification of the behaviour of object accesses at run time. The technique works by virtualising all method calls and field accesses associated ...
Process-shared and persistent code caches
Software code caches are increasingly being used to amortizethe runtime overhead of tools such as dynamic optimizers, simulators, and instrumentation engines. The additional memory consumed by these caches, along with the data structures used to manage ...
Using hypervisor to provide data secrecy for user applications on a per-page basis
Hypervisors are increasingly utilized in modern computer systems, ranging from PCs to web servers and data centers. Aside from server applications, hypervisors are also becoming a popular target for implementing many security systems, since they provide ...
Virtual machine-provided context sensitive page mappings
Context sensitive page mappings provide different mappings from virtual addresses to physical page frames depending on whether a memory reference occurs in a data or instruction context. Such differences can be used to modify the behavior of programs ...
VMM-based hidden process detection and identification using Lycosid
Use of stealth rootkit techniques to hide long-lived malicious processes is a current and alarming security issue. In this paper, we describe, implement, and evaluate a novel VMM-based hidden process detection and identification service called Lycosid ...
Policy enforcement and compliance proofs for Xen virtual machines
We address the problem of integrity management in a virtualized environment. We introduce a formal integrity model for managing the integrity of arbitrary aspects of a virtualized system. Based on the model, we describe an architecture called PEV, which ...
Opening black boxes: using semantic information to combat virtual machine image sprawl
Virtual-machine images are currently distributed as disk-image files, which are files that mirror the content of physical disks. This format is convenient for the virtual machine monitors that execute these images. However, it is not well-suited for ...
Execution replay of multiprocessor virtual machines
Execution replay of virtual machines is a technique which has many important applications, including debugging, fault-tolerance, and security. Execution replay for single processor virtual machines is well-understood, and available commercially. With ...
A principled approach to nondeferred reference-counting garbage collection
Nondeferred reference-counting (RC) garbage collection is among the oldest memory-management methods. Despite offering unique advantages, little attention has been paid on how to correctly implement it for modern programming languages. This paper ...
Cell GC: using the cell synergistic processor as a garbage collection coprocessor
In recent years, scaling of single-core superscalar processor performance has slowed due to complexity and power considerations. To improve program performance, designs are increasingly adopting chip multiprocessing with homogeneous or heterogeneous ...
Improving Xen security through disaggregation
Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) have been hailed as the basis for an increasing number of reliable or trusted computing systems. The Xen VMM is a relatively small piece of software -- a hypervisor -- that runs at a lower level than a conventional ...
Running a Java VM inside an operating system kernel
Operating system extensions have been shown to be beneficial to implement custom kernel functionality. In most implementations, the extensions are made by an administrator with kernel loadable modules. An alternative approach is to provide a run-time ...
Applications of a feather-weight virtual machine
A Feather-weight Virtual Machine (FVM) is an OS-level virtualization technology that enables multiple isolated execution environments to exist on a single Windows kernel. The key design goal of FVM is efficient resource sharing among VMs so as to ...
