Scheduling

(Note: This is just a placeholder while I organize the information I have and create the images)

QEMU

• Where does it fit in OS architecture?
• Simply a procdess, so: [Image 1 goes here]
• If a shell is running in QEMU, it is not seen from the regular terminal
• Quite analogous to the J(ava) V(irtual) M(achine)

Virtual Machine Monitor

• What do you emulate?
  • QEMU emulates everything (like PowerPC binaries for Intel x86 chip) [Image 2 goes here]
• If data coming in is the Linux kernel, it expects to be run in supervisor mode, so QEMU has to emulate supervisor mode (otherwise cannot process privileged instructions)
• If a program in user mode executes a privileged instruction, a software interrupt gets generated, and the kernel is called to look up the trap table
  • Example: division by zero
• We would like to emulate any hardware we want; so, why not just dump code directly on the CPU without QEMU in-between?
  • Cannot do this, because regular Linux kernel will catch the interrupts
    • One possible way to get around this is to take out privileged instructions from binaries (essentially rewrite them)

Hypervisor

• The kernel's kernel [Image 3 goes here]

Ring Model

• Unix only has two rings: kernel = 0, user = 3 [Image 4 hoes here]
• If hypervisor runs in -1, we can run multiple operating systems on top of the hypervisor [Image 5 goes here]
• The hypervisor is part of the mechanism that prevents pirated games from playing on the Play Station 3
• Hypervisor does not really affect performance, because it is tacked onto the I/O part of system calls
• Translating memory access from applications in user spaces means switching to kernel (supervisor), and then again from supervisor to hypervisor
• If running multiple operating systems, hypervisor designates one operating system to be the host or root access
• "Server consolidation" - using machines to the best of their abilities to conserve power

"Blue Pill"

• When an attacker comes in, they have to run as a user process
• To hide, try to modify kernel code to camouflage processes
• Put security code in hypervisor - only good if attacker does not get there first
• Apparently, Windows kernel can actually tell if it has been virtuatlized, because there is one process that cannot be changed - the clock, so determine virtualization by checking the timing of I/O and interrupts
• "Halting problem"

MMU

• How do we translate addresses? For some process, looking at address 2000 actually means looking at 8420
• Every instruction accessing memory has to perform this translation
• There exist tables that keep these - in page intervals (a pages is approximately a 4KB block)
• MMU needs a cache (very fast) to keep these tables
• MMU also requires a special kind of memory called associative memory (not like computers' main memory)
  • Content-based access, not address-based
• TLB - translational lookaside buffer is the table with tags (directly on MMU), <64K
• If the TLB misses, the kernel gets called
• Locality of reference: for data and for code, can be spatial and temporal

--Masha 00:30, 22 November 2007 (EST)