"...an awful lot of what goes into a modern operating system is just taking up space -- space that could be put to better use," writes Al Riske in his interview of Sun Senior Staff Engineer Mick Jordan, who is currently at work on a project called Guest VM, which involves the use of hypervisors to study the better uses that might be made of a modern operating system.

Riske puts it this way: "The experiment that Jordan is doing is this. He wants to see if he can create a complete software stack, implemented entirely in Java and hosted on Xen, the popular open-source hypervisor, with just the thinnest layer of old-style C code in between."

Gardening, Jordan says, is one of his pastimes. This comes as no surprise since there is an analogy to gardening -- at least to the weeding part -- in the work of Guest VM, where, Jordan comments, "We want to minimize the use of server resources and get the most out of the machine that we can. We don't need all the extraneous stuff that's in the operating system to support all kinds of other activities. Java's needs are very specific whereas the operating system is very general, so there's tons of code in there we don't need. We can just replace it with the pieces we need and optimize them for Java."

Riske enumerates the advantages of the Guest VM, which are four:

• improved performance
• better thread management
• simplified administration
• increased developer productivity

These results stem from the entire stack being written in Java, which means, Riske maintains, that the cumbersome transitions between layers are fewer in number and not written in several different programming languages.

Riske continues, "The Guest VM is capable of running a variety of micro-benchmarks and test programs, and it can run the SPECjbb benchmark, which simulates a server-side application. And it's almost ready to run large real-world applications such as Glassfish or Hadoop, which will provide the ultimate test."

The critical test, Jordan says, will be to determine whether " ... there's a performance benefit from having this single-language stack of software all under the control of the Java runtime."

Jordan sums things up this way: "I'm not interested in trying to replicate all of Solaris or all of Linux. That would be like trying to boil the ocean. Why would anyone want to do that?"

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Guest VM

Project: Maxine [...read more...]

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