The availability of virtualization features in modern CPUs has reinforced the trend of consolidating multiple guest operating systems on top of a hypervisor in order to improve platform-resource utilization and reduce the total cost of ownership. However, today's virtualization stacks are unduly large and therefore prone to attacks. If an adversary manages to compromise the hypervisor, subverting the security of all hosted operating systems is easy. We show how a thin and simple virtualization layer reduces the attack surface significantly and thereby increases the overall security of the system. We have designed and implemented a virtualization architecture that can host multiple unmodified guest operating systems. Its trusted computing base is at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of existing systems. Furthermore, on recent hardware, our implementation outperforms contemporary full virtualization environments.

Supercomputers and clouds both strive to make a large number of computing cores available for computation. More recently, similar objectives such as low-power, manageability at scale, and low cost of ownership are driving a more converged hardware and software. Challenges remain, however, of which one is that current cloud infrastructure does not yield the performance sought by many scientific applications. A source of the performance loss comes from virtualization and virtualization of the network in particular. This paper provides an introduction and analysis of a hybrid supercomputer software infrastructure, which allows direct hardware access to the communication hardware for the necessary components while providing the standard elastic cloud infrastructure for other components.

Open real-time systems provide for co-hosting hard-, soft- and non-real-time applications. Microkernel-based designs in addition allow for these applications to be mutually protected. Thus, trusted servers can coexist next to untrusted applications. These systems place a heavy burden on the performance of the message-passing mechanism, especially when based on microkernel-like inter-process communication. In this paper we introduce capacity-reserve donation (in short Credo), a mechanism for the fast interaction of interdependent components, which is applicable to common real-time resource-access models. We implemented Credo by extending L4's message-passing mechanism to provide proper resource accounting and time-donation control, thereby preserving desired real-time properties. We were able to achieve priority inheritance and stack-based priority-ceiling resource sharing with virtually no overhead added to L4's message-passing implementation. By providing a. mechanism that does not impose performance penalties, while still guaranteeing correct real-time behaviour, Credo allows for the usage of microkernels in general-purpose but also in specialized systems.