Making the Most Out of OS Virtual Machine Technology

OS Virtual Machines (OS VMs) were introduced in the 1960s to enable time-sharing of expensive hardware. In spite of rapidly falling hardware prices, OS VMs are still popular today. What makes them particularly interesting and useful is the capability to perform fine granular and secure logging of system execution. I claim that this is a fundamental property of OS VMs that real systems do not possess. This property has potential applications in multiple domains of computer science. What makes logging in OS VMs fundamentally more secure and fine granular than in real systems, is the fact that logging can be performed at the Virtual Machine Monitor (a software module that controls the virtual machine). The disadvantage of this is that logging is inherently low-level, and there is a semantic gap between the information that is being logged and the information that could be needed by an end-user. Understanding how to bridge this semantic gap is an open question, answering which is critical to our ability to exploit the full power of OS VMs.