Virtualization
Virtual machines are important not only in the enterprise domain, but also in embedded systems. The main reasons are their ability to support legacy re-use, and to provide a convenient environment in an otherwise bare-bones system. For example, a complete Linux system can be provided as a convenient high-level programming environment for application programs and sophisticated user interfaces. Virtualization supports such an environment while at the same time isolating the safety- or security-critical components or real-time subsystems from interference.
Furthermore, in multi- and many-core systems-on-chip, the indirection provided by virtualization is becoming be essential for effective management of global system resources, in particular energy.
Rather than being a primary research topic, virtualization for us is a vehicle for building complete systems on top of the seL4 microkernel (acting as a hypervisor), and an instance of a security architecture. Virtualization is an essential mechanism for our work on multi-criticality real-time systems.
Current Activities
Present activities focus two issues:
- Device virtualisation: infrastructure for efficient driver VMs that can be used instead of native drivers in the seL4 device driver framework and used with the Microkit and Lions OS;
- Makatea, a Qubes-like OS for server platforms.
Much of this work is not virtualization research of its own right, but instead is research that is heavily dependent on virtualization as a mechanism, and drives performance improvements.
Past activities
RapiLog: Reducing system complexity and improving performance by leveraging hypervisor dependability
We usually think of a high-assurance system like seL4 as an enabler for security- or safety-critical systems. However, we can leverage its dependability guarantees in circumstances where people nowadays go to great lengths to ensure dependability at the expense of increased complexity and often reduced performance.
RapiLog is a demonstration that things can be both simpler and faster when using seL4: It can boost database throughput by up to 100% (see figure on the right), with a simpler setup that leverages virtualization.
We run an unmodified database system on an unmodified (except for a custom driver) Linux system in a virtual machine on top of seL4. A virtual disk safely buffers log data and writes it to disk asynchronously, yet guarantees that the log is recoverable, even in the case of crashes of Linux or the DBMS, or of power blackouts. More details in the RapiLog paper (below).
Wombat and Darbat
Wombat was our para-virtualized Linux server on L4. It was the first portable (across architectures) version of a virtualized Linux on L4 (possibly the first portable virtualized Linux at all). It was later commercially supported by our spinout company Open Kernel Labs under the name OK Linux. We have consequently discontinued support for Wombat.
Darbat is a related project aiming at running a complete Mac OS X system on top of L4, possibly concurrently with a Linux (i.e. Wombat) system. Rather than straight para-virtualization of the Darwin kernel (consisting of Mach, a BSD kernel and IOkit), the Darbat project attempted to remove Mach completely, replacing its functionality by plain L4 mechanisms plus some user-level libraries. The aim was to run Darwin and IOkit in different (unprivileged) address spaces.
Pre-virtualization
Pre-virtualization is a new virtualization technique, which dramatically reduces the engineering cost of para-virtualization while maintaining its performance advantage over pure virtualization. Pre-virtualization, like pure virtualization, retains the original host platform architecture. This is achieved by automating the process of virtualising the guest OS.
Itanium Hypervisors
Our pre-virtualization work supports several different hypervisors on the Itanium architecture. One of them (vNUMA) is our own research project, others are developed elsewhere.
vNUMA
Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) is a virtual machine monitor that provides a virtual shared-memory multiprocessor system on a cluster. It supports a pre-virtualised Linux as a single-system-image operating system. vNUMA aimed to provide easy and efficient migration of legacy SMP applications to a cluster.
Xen/ia64
Xen is a widely-used open-source hypervisor. We were targeting Xen for or pre-virtualised Linux and are achieving the same (or better) performance as para-virtualised XenoLinux, with a fraction of the engineering cost.
Linux
Linux itself, more commonly used as a guest OS, can serve as a hypervisor, user-mode Linux (UML) is an example of this. While UML is an example of para-virtualised Linux, our Linux-on-Linux achieves better performance with dramatically reduced engineering cost.
People
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Past
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Publications
2022
 
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Gernot Heiser, Lucy Parker, Ivan Velickovic, Peter Chubb and Ben Leslie Can we put the "S" into IoT? IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, Yokohama, JP, November, 2022 |
2020
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Gernot Heiser, Gerwin Klein and June Andronick seL4 in Australia: From research to real-world trustworthy systems Communications of the ACM, Volume 63, Issue 4, pp. 72-75, April, 2020 |
2013
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Gernot Heiser, Etienne Le Sueur, Adrian Danis, Aleksander Budzynowski, Tudor-Ioan Salomie and Gustavo Alonso RapiLog: reducing system complexity through verification EuroSys Conference, pp. 323–336, Prague, Czech Republic, April, 2013 |
2011
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Prashant Varanasi and Gernot Heiser Hardware-supported virtualization on ARM Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys), pp. 5 pages, Shanghai, China, July, 2011 |
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Gernot Heiser, Leonid Ryzhyk, Michael von Tessin and Aleksander Budzynowski What if you could actually Trust your kernel? Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), pp. 1–5, Napa, CA, USA, May, 2011 |
2010
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Gernot Heiser and Ben Leslie The OKL4 microvisor: Convergence point of microkernels and hypervisors Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys), pp. 19–24, New Delhi, India, August, 2010 |
2009
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Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser vNUMA: A virtual shared-memory multiprocessor USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 349–362, San Diego, USA, June, 2009 |
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Joshua LeVasseur Device-driver reuse via virtual machines PhD Thesis, UNSW, Sydney, Australia, May, 2009 |
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Matthew Chapman vNUMA: Virtual shared-memory multiprocessors PhD Thesis, UNSW, Sydney, Australia, March, 2009 |
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Gernot Heiser Many-core chips — a case for virtual shared memory Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems, pp. 4 pages, Washington, DC, USA, March, 2009 |
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Gernot Heiser Hypervisors for consumer electronics IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, pp. 1–5, Las Vegas, NV, USA, January, 2009 |
2008
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Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Yaowei Yang, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, Ben Leslie and Gernot Heiser Pre-virtualization: Soft layering for virtual machines Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, pp. 1–9, Hsinchu, Taiwan, August, 2008 Best Paper Award |
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Gernot Heiser Do microkernels suck? Other Conference Presentation, Linux.conf.au, Melbourne, Australia, January, 2008. |
2007
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Gernot Heiser Virtualisation for embedded systems Technical Report, Open Kernel Labs, November, 2007 |
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Timothy Roscoe, Kevin Elphinstone and Gernot Heiser Hype and virtue Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), pp. 19–24, San Diego, USA, May, 2007 |
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Peter Chubb, Matthew Chapman and Myrto Zehnder [para]virtualisation without pain Linux.conf.au, Sydney, NSW, January, 2007 |
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Carl van Schaik and Gernot Heiser High-performance microkernels and virtualisation on ARM and segmented architectures International Workshop on Microkernels for Embedded Systems, Sydney, Australia, January, 2007 |
2006
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Geoffrey Lee and Charles Gray L4/Darwin: Evolving UNIX Conference for Unix, Linux and Open Source Professionals (AUUG), Melbourne, Vic, Australia, October, 2006 Slides |
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Myrto Zehnder and Peter Chubb Virtualising PCI Gelato ICE, Singapore, October, 2006 |
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Gernot Heiser, Volkmar Uhlig and Joshua LeVasseur Are virtual-machine monitors microkernels done right? ACM Operating Systems Review, Volume 40, Number 1, pp. 95–99, January, 2006 |
2005
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Joshua LeVasseur, Volkmar Uhlig, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, Ben Leslie and Gernot Heiser Pre-virtualization: Slashing the cost of virtualization Technical Report PA005520, NICTA, October, 2005 |
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Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser Implementing transparent shared memory on clusters using virtual machines USENIX, pp. 383–386, Anaheim, CA, USA, April, 2005 |
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Charles Gray, Matthew Chapman, Peter Chubb, David Mosberger-Tang and Gernot Heiser Itanium — a system implementor's tale USENIX, pp. 264–278, Anaheim, CA, USA, April, 2005 Best Student Paper Award |
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Ben Leslie, Carl van Schaik and Gernot Heiser Wombat: A portable user-mode Linux for embedded systems Linux.conf.au, Canberra, April, 2005 |
2002
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Volkmar Uhlig, Uwe Dannowski, Espen Skoglund, Andreas Haeberlen and Gernot Heiser Performance of address-space multiplexing on the Pentium Technical Report 2002-1, Computer Science Department, University of Karlsruhe, 2002 |