Hi all, We are a system research group from UCLA focusing on managed runtimes. We have some experience in kernel/JVM codesign. In our last project we modified Linux kernel to expose virtual memory subsystem to JVM to improve its GC performance under resource disaggregated datacenters. It will be subimitted to OSDI this year.
Recently we've been looking for new directions. One of the ideas is to merge JVM and kernel together, so that kernel can expose more system information (e.g., memory usage and layout, scheduling, network stack) to JVM. Some potential benefits may include better Java application performance, better GC performance, faster bootstrapping time, etc. The main target will be serverless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda) where most tasks are short lived function invocations. A slow start of JVM is prohibitive. An insight is that both the guest OS and JVM are virtual machines essentially, a lot of language and security checks in JVM may be redundant given that the guest OS is already well isolated. Memory allocation and reclaim may also work better since OS can see semantic information of memory pages. So our first try will be making JVM and kernel share the same memory management subsystem. For the new project, I am doing preliminary experiments to collect performance numbers and estimate potential benefits of the design. OSv is a very interesting and promising kernel that we'd like to dig more. Its boot time is blazing fast with Firecracker. I also saw from the original ATC paper and source code that it has a JVM ballooning mechanism. But I didn't see how it could work with unmodified JVM. In addition, if I want to compile both OSv and OpenJDK together from source into a single bootable image, is there any solutions or resources? I didn't see such documentation in OSv's github wiki. I know that OSv is designed to support arbitrary unmodifed Linux binaries. So our idea diverges from OSv's goal. But given the popularity of FaaS and microservices, a dedicated bootable JVM worths a try. Or we may later find some low-intrusive disign that doesn't conflict with OSv's goal. I know that academic projects often sound unrealistic and not get concerned by open source communities and industrial level projects. But I'd like to hear your opionions and ideas in this design. Thanks, Yuanqi -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OSv Development" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osv-dev/d636edd3-ca49-4858-8e47-ae85011549f4%40googlegroups.com.
