CS680V -- Virtualization

[Syllabus] [Lectures] [Policies]

Syllabus

Virtualization has revolutionized modern computing and communication systems over the last decade. Virtualization techniques play a key role across a range of computing environments, from small mobile devices, embedded systems, and personal computers to large-scale data centers, enterprise networks, and cloud platforms besides influencing the emerging IoT and connected vehicle platforms. Virtualization techniques have fundamental functional, security, and performance implications across the computing stack, from processor architectures, operating systems, runtime systems, and networking infrastructure. This course will cover fundamental techniques as well as cutting-edge research problems in virtualization. Topics include:

• Architecture support for virtualization
• System virtual Machines
• Unikernels
• Microkernels
• Library Operating Systems
• Security and virtual environments
• Network Function Virtualization
• Live migration
• Virtualization-at scale in cloud computing and High-performance Computing

Course Information:

• Time: Friday 1:10PM to 4:10PM
• Location: ENGB G-14
• Instructor:Prof. Kartik Gopalan (kartik@bighamton.edu)
• Office Hours: Friday 12noon-1pm or by appointment.

Prerequisites:

• CS350 -- Undergraduate OS. You must be familiar with the fundamentals concepts in Operating Systems as covered in CS350.
• You must be proficient with C programming and use of debuggers (such as gdb).
• You must be comfortable working and programming in the Linux environment.

Evaluation Criteria:

• 50% - Paper summaries
• 50% - Presentation, leading discussions, and participation

Course Materials:

The primary source of course materials will be papers posted online on this website.

Recommended Material:

• Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization, Editors: Edouard Bugnion, Jason Nieh, and Dan Tsafrir. Synthesis Lectures in Computer Science, 2017. Morgan and Claypool Publishers. [PDF]
• Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes, By James E. Smith Jim, Jr. Smith, Ravi Nair. Publisher Morgan Kaufmann. Excerpts available online.
• Modern Operating Systems, by Andrew Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall; 4th edition.
• Kernighan, Ritchie, The C Programming Language
• Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. (This book is also available online at http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/).

Credit hours and course expectations: This is a 3-credit course, which means that students are expected to do at least 9 to 9.5 hours of course-related work or activity each week during the semester. This includes scheduled class lecture/discussion meeting times as well as time spent completing assigned readings, studying for tests and examinations, participating in lab sessions, preparing written assignments, and other course-related tasks.

[Syllabus] [Lectures] [Policies]

Lecture Slides

More lectures and slides will be added below as the course progresses.

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1. Introduction to Virtual Machines
   • Recorded Lecture
   • Chapter 1, HSSV book
   • [smith03overview], Smith and Nair
   • Chapter 7 Tanenbaum 4th Edition
2. Principles of System Design
   • Hints for Computer System Design
   • Chapter 6 from Srinivas and Keshav's book.
3. Conditions for ISA Virtualizability
   • Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third-Generation Architectures
   • Chapter 2, HSSV book
   • Chapter 8, Smith and Nair book
4. Para-virtualization and Hybrid VMs: Disco, VMWare, Xen
   • Chapter 3, HSSV Book
   • Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors
   • Bringing Virtualization to the x86 Architecture with the Original VMware Workstation
   • Xen and the art of virtualization
5. Unikernels
   • Unikernels: The Rise of the Virtual Library operating System
   • Wikipedia: Unikernel
6. Multi-kernels
   • Lego OS
   • Barrelfish/DC
7. Barrelfish OS
   • The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems
8. Library OS: Graphene
   • Cooperation and security isolation of library OSes for multi-process applications
   • Graphene-SGX: A Practical Library OS for Unmodified Applications on SGX
9. Live Hypervisor Replacement
   • Fast and Live Hypervisor Replacement
   • The Turtles Project: Design and Implementation of Nested Virtualization
10. Dune and Arrakis
    • Dune: Safe User-level Access to Privileged CPU Features [Presentation] [Dune Code]
    • Arrakis: The Operating System Is the Control Plane [Presentation] [Arrakis Code]
11. Elasticizing Linux via Joint Disaggregation of Memory and Computation
12. Library OS for Containers
    • X-Containers: Breaking Down Barriers to Improve Performance and Isolation of Cloud-Native Containers