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Deterministic Execution of Multiprocessor Virtual Machines

Authors:
Junkang Nong
Qingbo Wu
Yusong Tan

Keywords: availability; concurrency; deterministic execution; security

Abstract:
Deterministic execution offers a lot of benefits for debugging, fault tolerance, security of multiprocessor systems. Most previous work to address this issue either depends on custom hardware or needs to recompile the program. Some others combine the hardware and software technologies. Our goal in this work is to provide deterministic execution and repeatability of arbitrary, unmodified, multiprocessor systems without custom hardware. To this end, we propose a new abstraction of a multiprocessor virtual machine named Deterministic Concurrency State Machine (DCSM). With the virtual private memory model, the multiprocessor virtual machine can execute deterministically as a DCSM. With the replay of the DCSM, better debugging methods and intrusion analysis can be obtained to improve the availability and security of the whole system, not only a program. We implemented DCSM on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and the performance cost can be acceptable if some parameters and optimization strategies are chosen correctly based on the preliminary evaluation results.

Pages: 205 to 210

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: September 25, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-153-3

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from September 25, 2011 to September 30, 2011