Friendly Virtual Machine: Leveraging a Feedback-Control Model for Application Adaptation

With the increased use of "Virtual Machines" (VMs) as vehicles that isolate applications running on the same host, it is necessary to devise techniques that enable multiple VMs to share underlying resources both fairly and efficiently. To that end, one common approach is to deploy complex resource management techniques in the hosting infrastructure. Alternately, in this paper, we advocate the use of self-adaptation in the VMs themselves based on feedback about resource usage and availability. Consequently, we define a "Friendly" VM (FVM) to be a virtual machine that adjusts its demand for system resources, so that they are both efficiently and fairly allocated to competing FVMs. Such properties are ensured using one of many provably convergent control rules, such as AIMD. By adopting this distributed application-based approach to resource management, it is not necessary to make assumptions about the underlying resources nor about the requirements of FVMs competing for these resources. To demonstrate the elegance and simplicity of our approach, we present a prototype implementation of our FVM framework in User-Mode Linux (UML)-an implementation that consists of less than 500 lines of code changes to UML. We present an analytic, control-theoretic model of FVM adaptation, which establishes convergence and fairness properties. These properties are also backed up with experimental results using our prototype FVM implementation.

Lightweight Modeling of Java Virtual Machine Security Constraints using Alloy

The Java programming language has been widely described as secure by design. Nevertheless, a number of serious security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Java, particularly in the component known as the Bytecode Verifier. This paper describes a method for representing Java security constraints using the Alloy modeling language. It further describes a system for performing a security analysis on any block of Java bytecodes by converting the bytes into relation initializers in Alloy. Any counterexamples found by the Alloy analyzer correspond directly to insecure code. Analysis of a real-world malicious applet is given to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.

A Virtual Deadline Scheduler for Window-Constrained Service Guarantees

This paper presents a new approach to window-constrained scheduling, suitable for multimedia and weakly-hard real-time systems. We originally developed an algorithm, called Dynamic Window-Constrained Scheduling (DWCS), that attempts to guarantee no more than x out of y deadlines are missed for real-time jobs such as periodic CPU tasks, or delay-constrained packet streams. While DWCS is capable of generating a feasible window-constrained schedule that utilizes 100% of resources, it requires all jobs to have the same request periods (or intervals between successive service requests). We describe a new algorithm called Virtual Deadline Scheduling (VDS), that provides window-constrained service guarantees to jobs with potentially different request periods, while still maximizing resource utilization. VDS attempts to service m out of k job instances by their virtual deadlines, that may be some finite time after the corresponding real-time deadlines. Notwithstanding, VDS is capable of outperforming DWCS and similar algorithms, when servicing jobs with potentially different request periods. Additionally, VDS is able to limit the extent to which a fraction of all job instances are serviced late. Results from simulations show that VDS can provide better window-constrained service guarantees than other related algorithms, while still having as good or better delay bounds for all scheduled jobs. Finally, an implementation of VDS in the Linux kernel compares favorably against DWCS for a range of scheduling loads.