Christoffer Dall

Cells: a virtual mobile smartphone architecture

Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users carry multiple phones to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. We present Cells, a virtualization architecture for enabling multiple virtual smartphones to run simultaneously on the same physical cellphone in an isolated, secure manner. Cells introduces a usage model of having one foreground virtual phone and multiple background virtual phones. This model enables a new device namespace mechanism and novel device proxies that integrate with lightweight operating system virtualization to multiplex phone hardware across multiple virtual phones while providing native hardware device performance. Cells virtual phone features include fully accelerated 3D graphics, complete power, management features, and full telephony functionality with separately assignable telephone numbers and caller ID support. We have implemented a prototype of Cells that supports multiple Android virtual phones on the same phone. Our performance results demonstrate that Cells imposes only modest runtime and memory overhead, works seamlessly across multiple hardware devices including Google Nexus 1 and Nexus S phones, and transparently runs Android applications at native speed without any modifications.

KVM/ARM: the design and implementation of the linux ARM hypervisor

As ARM CPUs become increasingly common in mobile devices and servers, there is a growing demand for providing the benefits of virtualization for ARM-based devices. We present our experiences building the Linux ARM hypervisor, KVM/ARM, the first full system ARM virtualization solution that can run unmodified guest operating systems on ARM multicore hardware. KVM/ARM introduces split-mode virtualization, allowing a hypervisor to split its execution across CPU modes and be integrated into the Linux kernel. This allows KVM/ARM to leverage existing Linux hardware support and functionality to simplify hypervisor development and maintainability while utilizing recent ARM hardware virtualization extensions to run virtual machines with comparable performance to native execution. KVM/ARM has been successfully merged into the mainline Linux kernel, ensuring that it will gain wide adoption as the virtualization platform of choice for ARM. We provide the first measurements on real hardware of a complete hypervisor using ARM hardware virtualization support. Our results demonstrate that KVM/ARM has modest virtualization performance and power costs, and can achieve lower performance and power costs compared to x86-based Linux virtualization on multicore hardware.

The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Cells: A Virtual Smartphone Architecture

Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users carry multiple phones to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. We present Cells, a virtualization architecture for enabling multiple virtual smartphones to run simultaneously on the same physical cellphone in an isolated, secure manner. Cells introduces a usage model of having one foreground virtual phone and multiple background virtual phones. This model enables a new device namespace mechanism and novel device proxies that integrate with lightweight operating system virtualization to multiplex phone hardware across multiple virtual phones while providing native hardware device performance. Cells virtual phone features include fully accelerated 3D graphics, complete power management features, and full telephony functionality with separately assignable telephone numbers and caller ID support. We have implemented a prototype of Cells that supports multiple Android virtual phones on the same phone. Our performance results demonstrate that Cells imposes only modest runtime and memory overhead, works seamlessly across multiple hardware devices including Google Nexus 1 and Nexus S phones, and transparently runs Android applications at native speed without any modifications.

Cider: native execution of iOS apps on android

We present Cider, an operating system compatibility architecture that can run applications built for different mobile ecosystems, iOS or Android, together on the same smartphone or tablet. Cider enhances the domestic operating system, Android, of a device with kernel-managed, per-thread personas to mimic the application binary interface of a foreign operating system, iOS, enabling it to run unmodified foreign binaries. This is accomplished using a novel combination of binary compatibility techniques including two new mechanisms: compile-time code adaptation, and diplomatic functions. Compile-time code adaptation enables existing unmodified foreign source code to be reused in the domestic kernel, reducing implementation effort required to support multiple binary interfaces for executing domestic and foreign applications. Diplomatic functions leverage per-thread personas, and allow foreign applications to use domestic libraries to access proprietary software and hardware interfaces. We have built a Cider prototype, and demonstrate that it imposes modest performance overhead and runs unmodified iOS and Android applications together on a Google Nexus tablet running the latest version of Android.

KVM/ARM: Experiences Building the Linux ARM Hypervisor

As ARM CPUs become increasingly common in mobile devices and servers, there is a growing demand for providing the benefits of virtualization for ARMbased devices. We present our experiences building the Linux ARM hypervisor, KVM/ARM, the first full system ARM virtualization solution that can run unmodified guest operating systems on ARM multicore hardware. KVM/ARM introduces split-mode virtualization, allowing a hypervisor to split its execution across CPU modes to take advantage of CPU mode-specific features. This allows KVM/ARM to leverage Linux kernel services and functionality to simplify hypervisor development and maintainability while utilizing recent ARM hardware virtualization extensions to run application workloads in guest operating systems with comparable performance to native execution. KVM/ARM has been successfully merged into the mainline Linux 3.9 kernel, ensuring that it will gain wide adoption as the virtualization platform of choice for ARM. We provide the first measurements on real hardware of a complete hypervisor using ARM hardware virtualization support. Our results demonstrate that KVM/ARM has modest virtualization performance and power costs, and can achieve lower performance and power costs compared to x86-based Linux virtualization on multicore hardware.

ARM virtualization: performance and architectural implications

ARM servers are becoming increasingly common, making server technologies such as virtualization for ARM of growing importance. We present the first study of ARM virtualization performance on server hardware, including multi-core measurements of two popular ARM and x86 hypervisors, KVM and Xen. We show how ARM hardware support for virtualization can enable much faster transitions between VMs and the hypervisor, a key hypervisor operation. However, current hypervisor designs, including both Type 1 hypervisors such as Xen and Type 2 hypervisors such as KVM, are not able to leverage this performance benefit for real application workloads. We discuss the reasons why and show that other factors related to hypervisor software design and implementation have a larger role in overall performance. Based on our measurements, we discuss changes to ARMs hardware virtualization support that can potentially bridge the gap to bring its faster VM-to-hypervisor transition mechanism to modern Type 2 hypervisors running real applications. These changes have been incorporated into the latest ARM architecture.

Teaching operating systems using code review

Learning about operating systems often involves modifying a large and complex code base. Grading student projects can be difficult and time consuming, yet students often do not learn from their programming errors and struggle to understand core operating system concepts. We present GradeBoard, a code review system designed to simplify grading for instructors and enable students to understand and learn from their errors. GradeBoard provides an easy-to-use Web interface that allows instructors to annotate student code submissions with grading comments and scores, and students to discuss the comments and scores with instructors. GradeBoard presents student code changes with syntax highlighting and lets users collapse or expand code sections to provide a desired level of context, making it easier to read and understand student programming project submissions. Comments and scores are easily identifiable by visual cues, improving interaction between instructors and students. We have deployed and used GradeBoard in a large operating systems course involving Linux kernel programming projects. GradeBoard provided robust, easy-to-use functionality for reviewing Linux kernel code changes, improved the instructional staff grading experience, and over 90% of students surveyed indicated that GradeBoard improved their understanding of the kernel programming projects better than other alternatives.

A Measurement Study of ARM Virtualization Performance

ARM servers are becoming increasingly common, making server technologies such as virtualization for ARM of growing importance. We present the first in-depth study of ARM virtualization performance on ARM server hardware, including measurements of two popular ARM and x86 hypervisors, KVM and Xen. We show how the ARM hardware support for virtualization can support much faster transitions between VMs and the hypervisor, a key hypervisor operation. However, current hypervisor designs, including both Type 1 hypervisors such as Xen and Type 2 hypervisors such as KVM, are not able to leverage this performance benefit in practice for real application workloads. We discuss the reasons why and show that other factors related to hypervisor software design and implementation have a larger role in overall performance. Based on our measurements, we discuss changes to ARM’s hardware virtualization support that can potentially bridge the gap to bring its faster VM-tohypervisor transition mechanism to modern Type 2 hypervisors running real applications. These changes have been incorporated into the latest ARM architecture.

NEVE: Nested Virtualization Extensions for ARM

Nested virtualization, the ability to run a virtual machine inside another virtual machine, is increasingly important because of the need to deploy virtual machines running software stacks on top of virtualized cloud infrastructure. As ARM servers make inroads in cloud infrastructure deployments, supporting nested virtualization on ARM is a key requirement, which has been met recently with the introduction of nested virtualization support to the ARM architecture. We build the first hypervisor to use ARM nested virtualization support and show that despite similarities between ARM and x86 nested virtualization support, performance on ARM is much worse than on x86. This is due to excessive traps to the hypervisor caused by differences in non-nested virtualization support. To address this problem, we introduce a novel paravirtualization technique to rapidly prototype architectural changes for virtualization and evaluate their performance impact using existing hardware. Using this technique, we propose Nested Virtualization Extensions for ARM (NEVE), a set of simple architectural changes to ARM that can be used by software to coalesce and defer traps by logging the results of hypervisor instructions until the results are actually needed by the hypervisor or virtual machines. We show that NEVE allows hypervisors running real application workloads to provide an order of magnitude better performance than current ARM nested virtualization support and up to three times less overhead than x86 nested virtualization. NEVE will be included in ARMv8.4, the next version of the ARM architecture.