L4Ka Project

L4Ka Virtual Machine Technology

We research new technologies for improving the virtual machine experience, addressing microkernels, hypervisors, the performance of running commodity operating systems in virtual machines, techniques for easily accomplishing virtualization, and the application of virtual machines for solving problems.

Projects

Pre-virtualization with Compiler Afterburning
We are developing automation technology for virtualizing operating systems. We enable a single guest OS binary to execute on a variety of hypervisors, and on raw hardware, with the performance of para-virtualization.

Unmodified reuse of device drivers
New operating systems need access to devices, yet the cost of developing the device drivers is dramatic. We developed a technique to reuse pre-existing device drivers, unmodified.

Multiprocessor scalability
A virtual machine environment provides the benefits of flexibly scheduling concurrent virtual machines. We show how to maintain multiprocessor performance in the virtual machine environment.

L4Ka virtual machine environment
For our experiments and research, we are developing light infrastucture to run virtual machines on the L4Ka::Pistachio microkernel.

BurnNT
BurnNT is a project to develop a virtual machine environment that runs as a normal Windows NT application. It hosts pre-virtualized guest kernels.

 

Publications

Device Driver Reuse via Virtual Machines
Joshua LeVasseur
Dissertation, School of Computer Science and Engineering of The University of New South Wales, Australia, May 2009
  [pdf]
Pre-virtualization: Soft Layering for Virtual Machines
Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Yaowei Yang, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, Ben Leslie and Gernot Heiser
Proceedings of the 13th IEEE Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, Hsinchu, Taiwan, August 4-6, 2008, Best Paper Award
  [pdf]
Energy Management for Hypervisor-Based Virtual Machines
Jan Stoess, Christian Lang, and Frank Bellosa
Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX Technical Conference, Santa Clara, CA, June 17-22, 2007
  [pdf]
Pre-Virtualization: Soft Layering for Virtual Machines
Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, Ben Leslie, and Gernot Heiser
Technical Report 2006-15, Fakultät für Informatik, Universität Karlsruhe, July 2006
  [pdf]
Are virtual-machine monitors microkernels done right?
Gernot Heiser, Volkmar Uhlig, Joshua LeVasseur
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 95-99, January 2006
  [pdf]
Pre-Virtualization: Slashing the Cost of Virtualization
Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, Ben Leslie, Gernot Heiser
Fakultät für Informatik, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Technical Report 2005-30, November 2005
  [pdf]
Pre-Virtualization: Uniting Two Worlds
Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Ben Leslie, Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser
Poster session of 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-20), October 23-26, 2005, Brighton, United Kingdom
  [pdf]
Are Virtual-Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right?
Gernot Heiser, Volkmar Uhlig, Joshua LeVasseur
National ICT Australia, Technical Report, October 2005
  [pdf]
Unmodified Device Driver Reuse and Improved System Dependability via Virtual Machines
Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Jan Stoess, and Stefan Götz
Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '04), December 6-8, 2004, San Francisco, CA
  [pdf]
A Sledgehammer Approach to Reuse of Legacy Device Drivers
Joshua LeVasseur and Volkmar Uhlig
Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, September 19-22, 2004, Leuven, Belgium
  [pdf]
Towards Scalable Multiprocessor Virtual Machines
Volkmar Uhlig, Joshua LeVasseur, Espen Skoglund, and Uwe Dannowski
Proceedings of the 3rd Virtual Machine Research & Technology Symposium (VM'04), May 6-7, 2004, San Jose, CA
  [pdf]
Flexible and Scalable Virtual Machines
Volkmar Uhlig, Joshua LeVasseur, Espen Skoglund, and Uwe Dannowski
Poster session of 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-19), October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY
  [pdf]