Unpicking the knot: teasing apart VM/application interdependencies

Flexible and efficient runtime design requires an understanding of the dependencies among the components internal to the runtime and those between the application and the runtime. These dependencies are frequently unclear. This problem exists in all runtime design, and is most vivid in a metacircular runtime — one that is implemented in terms of itself. Metacircularity blurs boundaries between application and runtime implementation, making it harder to understand and make guarantees about overall system behavior, affecting isolation, security, and resource management, as well as reducing opportunities for optimization. Our goal is to shed new light on VM interdependencies, helping all VM designers understand these dependencies and thereby engineer better runtimes. We explore these issues in the context of a high-performance Java-in-Java virtual machine. Our approach is to identify and instrument transition points into and within the runtime, which allows us to establish a dynamic e...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Yi Lin, Stephen M. Blackburn, Daniel Frampton
• Keywords: Execution Context, Execution State, Programming Languages Processors, VEE 2012, Virtualization