vLibOS: Babysitting OS Evolution with a Virtualized Library OS

Abstract: Many applications have service requirements that are not easily met by existing operating systems. Real-time and security-critical tasks, for example, often require custom OSes to meet their needs. However, development of special purpose OSes is a time-consuming and difficult exercise. Drivers, libraries and applications have to be written from scratch or ported from existing sources. Many researchers have tackled this problem by developing ways to extend existing systems with application-specific services. However, it is often difficult to ensure an adequate degree of separation between legacy and new services, especially when security and timing requirements are at stake. Virtualization, for example, supports logical isolation of separate guest services, but suffers from inadequate temporal isolation of time-critical code required for real-time systems. This paper presents vLibOS, a master-slave paradigm for new systems, whose services are built on legacy code that is temporally and spatially isolated in separate VM domains. Existing OSes are treated as sandboxed libraries, providing legacy services that are requested by inter-VM calls, which execute with the time budget of the caller. We evaluate a real-time implementation of vLibOS. Empirical results show that vLibOS achieves as much as a 50\% reduction in performance slowdown for real-time threads, when competing for a shared memory bus with a Linux VM.