Reading
The ESX Server paper is one of my personal favorite papers in systems research and I can’t resist assigning it. Firecracker discusses how virtual machines are used in serverless computing, and gives more insight into cloud computing deployments.
-
“Memory resource management in VMware ESX Server”, Carl A. Waldspurger (OSDI 2002)
-
“Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications”, Alexandru Agache, Marc Brooker, Andreea Florescu, Alexandra Iordache, Anthony Liguori, Rolf Neugebauer, Phil Piwonka, Diana-Maria Popa (NSDI 2020; presentation available)
Reading questions
-
The ESX Server paper is concerned largely with handling memory contention among VMs. The Firecracker VMM, in contrast, “depend[s] on Linux’s process scheduler and memory manager for handling contention between VMs.” Describe the architectural differences between Firecracker and ESX Server that allow this.
-
ESX Server is all about performance hacking. Which aspects of Firecracker’s design might benefit from similar performance hacking, if any?