Virtual machine based OS structure and its communication mechanism

摘要

In ubiquitous computing and embedded software, systems requires dynamic configurations and adaptations for applications. Because target hardware performance is various, and it is sensitive to an environmental change. This paper describes an extensible operating system construction model that based on a virtual machine concept and its communication mechanism. We supposed a three-tiered system model: application layer, virtual machine layer, kernel layer. A kernel layer provides a hardware abstruction and primitive operations for hardware access. A virtual machine layer provides resource management policies. Further we supposed lightweight flow control using continuation for inter virtual machine communications. We have developed a FAT file system in C and WabaVM each other, and measured virtualization overheads such as file read. As a result, we found WabaVM's file read execution time is about 25 times than C.