The goal of the master thesis is the paravirtualization of HelenOS operating system for Xen hypervisor on IA-32. The result of the thesis is a prototype implementation which allows to run HelenOS as a PV guest under Xen hypervisor. The thesis analyses the Xen hypervisor interface with respect to the paravirtualized operating system running under it, the relevant parts of HelenOS kernel and changes in them forced by the paravirtualization.

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Context. Virtualized networks are considered a major advancement in the technology of today, virtualized networks are offering plenty of functional benefits compared to todays dedicated networking elements. The virtualization allows network designers to separate networks and adapting the resources depending on the actual loads in other words, Load Balancing. Virtual networks would enable a minimized downtime for deployment of updates and similar tasks by performing a simple migration and then updating the linking after properly testing and preparing the Virtual Machine with the new software. When this technology is successfully proven to be efficient or evaluated and later adapted to the existing flaws. Virtualized networks will at that point claim the tasks of todays dedicated networking elements. But there are still unknown behaviors and effects of the technology for example, how the scheduler or hypervisor handles the virtual separation since they do share the same physical transmission resources.Objectives. By performing the experiments in this thesis, the hope is to learn about the effects of virtualization and how it performs under stress. By learning about the performance under stress it would also increase the knowledge about the efficiency of network virtualization. The experiments are conducted by creating scripts, using already written programs and systems, adding different loads and measuring the effects, this is documented so that other students and researchers can benefit from the research done in this thesis.Methods. In this thesis 5 different methodologies are performed: Experimental validation, statistical comparative analysis, resource sharing, control theory and literature review. Two systems are compared to previous research by evaluating the statistical results and analyzing them. As mentioned earlier the investigation of this thesis is focusing on how the scheduler executes the resource sharing under stress. The first system which is the control test is designed without any interference and a 5 Mbit/s UDP stream which is going through the system under test and being timestamped on measurement points on both the ingress and the egress, the second experiment involves an interfering load of a 5 Mbit/s UDP stream on the same system under test. Since it is a complex system quite some literature reviewing was done but mostly to gain a understanding and an overview of the different parts of the system and so that some obstacles would be able to be avoided.Results. The statistical comparative analysis of the experiments produced two graphs and two tables containing the coefficient of variance of the two experiments. The graph of the control test produced a graph with a quite even distribution over the time intervals with a coefficient of variance difference to the power of 10−3 and increasing somewhat over the larger time intervals. The second experiment with two virtual machines and an interfering packet stream are more distributed over the 0.0025 seconds and the 0.005 seconds intervals with a larger difference than the control test having a difference to the power of 10−2, showing some signs of a bottleneck in the system.Conclusions. Since the performance of the experiments and also the statistical handling of the data took longer than expected the choice was made to not deploy the system using Open Virtual Switch instead of Linux Bridge, hence there is not any other experiments to compare the performance with. But from referred research under related works the researcher concluded that the difference between Open Virtual Switch and Linux Bridge is small when compared without introducing any load. This is also confirmed on the website of Open Virtual Switch which states that Open Virtual Switch uses the same base as Linux Bridge. Linux Bridge is performing according to the expectations, it is a simple yet powerful tool and the results are confirming the previous research which claims that there are bottlenecks in the system. According to the pre-set requirement for validity for this experiment the difference of the CoV would be greater than to the power of 10−5, the measured difference was to the power of 10−2 which gives support to the theory that there are bottlenecks in the system. In the future it would be interesting to examine more about the effects of different hypervisors, virtualization techniques, packet generators etcetera to tackle these problems. A company that have taken countermeasures is Intel who have developed DPDK which confronts these efficiency problems by tailoring the scheduler towards the specific tasks. The downside of Intel’s DPDK is that it limits the user to Intel processors and removes one of the most important benefits of virtualization, the independence. But Intel have tried to keep it as independent as possible by maintaining DPDK as open source.

Traditional network stacks in monolithic kernels have reliability and security concerns. Any fault in a network stack affects the entire system owing to lack of isolation in the monolithic kernel. Moreover, the large code size of the network stack enlarges the attack surface of the system. A multiserver OS design solves this problem. In contrast to the traditional network stack, a multiserver OS pushes the network stack into the network server as a user process, which performs three enhancements: (i) allows the network server to run in user mode while having its own address space and isolating any fault occurring in the network server; (ii) minimizes the attack surface of the system because the trusted computing base contracts; (iii) enables failure recovery, which is an important feature supported by a multiserver OS. This thesis proposes a network server for LibrettOS, an operating system based on rumprun unikernels and the Xen Hypervisor developed by Virginia Tech. The proposed network server is a service domain providing an L2 frame forwarding service for application domains and based on rumprun such that the existing device drivers of NetBSD can be leveraged with little modification. In this model, the TCP/IP stack runs directly in the address space of applications. This allows retaining the client state even if the network server crashes and makes it possible to recover from a network server failure. We leverage the Xen PCI passthrough to access a NIC (Network Interface Controller) from the network server. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the performance of the network server is good and comparable with Linux and NetBSD. We also demonstrate the successful recovery after a failure. / This research is based upon work supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the ODNI, IARPA, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. This research is also based upon work supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grants N00014-16-1-2104, N00014-16-1-2711, and N00014-18-1-2022. / Master of Science / When it comes to reliability and security in networking systems, concerns have been shown in traditional operating systems (OSs) such as Windows, MacOS, NetBSD, and Linux. Any fault in a networking system can have impacts on the entire system owing to lack of isolation in the OSs. Moreover, the large code size of a networking system enlarges the attack surface of the system. A multiserver OS design solves this problem by running a networking system as a network server, which performs three enhancements: (i) isolates any fault occurring in the network server itself; (ii) minimizes the attack surface of the system; and (iii) enables failure recovery. This thesis proposes a network server for LibrettOS, an operating system developed by Virginia Tech. The proposed network has two-pronged merits: (i) provides a system server providing a network packet forwarding service for applications; (ii) enables the existing device drivers of NetBSD to be leveraged with low amount of modification. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the performance of the network server outperforms state-of-the-art and comparable with Linux and that a successful recovery is possible after a failure.

The aim of the master thesis is to create a prototype implementation of the interface of the Xen hypervisor within the HelenOS operating system. The target architecture of this prototype implementation is IA-32. The result of the thesis is a port of HelenOS which can be uses to run the selected para-virtualized domain. The thesis contains a brief introduction to the methods of virtualization and describes the main differences between them. Thesis also describes the parts of the architecture of the Xen hypervisor and the HelenOS operating system, which will be modified in the prototype implementation. The most important part of this thesis is to select of the t testing domain as well as analyze and describe all changes, which were required for the do-main's operation.

Virtualization is the key technology which has provided smarter and easier ways for effectively utilizing resources provided by the hypervisor. Virtualization allows multiple operative systems (OS) to run on a single hardware. The resources from a hardware are allocated to virtual machines (VM) by hypervisor. It is important to know how the performance of virtual switches used in hypervisor for network communication affect the network traffic.   Performance of Linux Bridge (LB) and Open vSwitch (OVS) is investigated in this study. The method that has been used in this research is experimentation. Two different scenarios are used to benchmark the performance of LB and OVS in virtual and non-virtual environment. Performance metrics bitrate is used to benchmark the performance LB and OVS. The results received from the experimental runs contains the ingress bitrate and egress bitrate of LB and OVS in virtual and non-virtual environment. The results also contain the ingress and egress bitrate values from scenarios with different memory and CPU cores in virtual environment. Results achieved in this thesis report are from multiple experiment configurations. From results it can concluded that LB and OVS have almost same performance in non-virtual environment. There are small differences in ingress and egress of both virtual switches.

Submitted by Daniella Sodre (daniella.sodre@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T13:26:34Z No. of bitstreams: 2 dissertação Cyros da Silva.pdf: 1649531 bytes, checksum: 7f67a5d2cb492b92a5fd69b6fc1ffb74 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-10T13:26:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 dissertação Cyros da Silva.pdf: 1649531 bytes, checksum: 7f67a5d2cb492b92a5fd69b6fc1ffb74 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-09-12 / A virtualização de servidores tem trazido mudanças no mundo da hospedagem de sites e aplicações web. Na abordagem tradicional, por questões de isolamento cada máquina física fica atrelada a uma aplicação ou a um serviço, o que acarreta em uma subutilização dos recursos computacionais. A virtualização de servidores supera essa limitação proporcionando diversos benefícios como: a redução nos custos operacionais (dado que são necessárias menos máquinas físicas), utilização mais eficiente dos recursos e um menor tempo para disponibilização de servidores. A utilização de acordos de nível de serviço (SLAs) é uma prática comum que ocorre na hospedagem de aplicações web. No entanto, existem desafios no cumprimento de SLAs em ambientes virtualizados. Um deles é que não é trivial converter os objetivos de nível de serviço (SLOs) que usam métricas de nível de aplicação, como tempo de resposta ou transações por segundo, na alocação de recursos de baixo nível, como CPU e memória. Além disso, visto que a carga de trabalho em que os servidores são submetidos varia com o tempo, alocações de recursos estáticas só são suficientes para garantir o nível de serviço se os recursos forem alocados para os picos de demanda, o que leva a subutilização no restante do tempo. Nesta dissertação foi desenvolvida uma solução de monitoramento e controle que ajusta dinamicamente os parâmetros do escalonamento de CPU do ambiente virtualizado de forma a evitar que os acordos de nível de serviço sejam violados. A abordagem utilizada foi derivada de um controlador de referência na literatura. Foram realizados experimentos num ambiente com o hypervisor Xen usando uma aplicação e cargas representativas, e as soluções foram avaliadas. Os resultados obtidos foram compatíveis para os cenários investigados.

Malicious software (malware) attacks are an ever-increasing cyber-security problem. One reason for this trend is the widespread adoption of packing technology as a way to mask the semantics of binary instructions, hiding them from detection. Packing is so successful that it is estimated 70-80% of malicious programs utilize it to avoid detection [1]. The popularity of virtualization provides new tools for dealing with this threat. Researchers have successfully used facilities provided by virtualization to develop new ways of detecting and analyzing packed and encrypted malware. Methods like these typically require changes to the virtualization platform, making them difficult to deploy as well as hard to reuse. This thesis presents Maitland, a proof-of-concept unpacking system which achieves similar functionality to existing research, using paravirtualization extensions instead of requiring changes to the hypervisor. During our experiments, Maitland successfully exposed instructions in software that was packed by the UPX and gzexe packers. Maitland’s avoidance of changes to the hypervisor means it is better suited for quick deployment in a cloud environment. / Graduate

The surge in the cloud computing is due to its cost effective benefits and the rapid scalability of computing resources, and the crux of this is virtualization.  Virtualization technology enables a single physical machine to be shared by multiple operating systems. This increases the eciency of the hardware, hence decreases the cost of cloud computing. However, as the load in the guest operating system increases, at some point the physical resources cannot support all the applications efficiently. Input and output services, especially network applications, must share the same total bandwidth and this sharing can be negatively affected by virtualization overheads. Network packets may undergo additional processing and have to wait until the virtual machine is scheduled by the underlying hypervisor before reaching the final service application, such as a web server.In a virtualized environment it is not the load (due to the processing of the user data) but the network overhead, that is the major problem. Modern network interface cards have enhanced network virtualization by handling IP packets more intelligently through TCP segmentation offload, interrupt coalescence, and other virtualization specific hardware. Jumbo frames have long been proposed for their advantages in traditional environment. They increase network throughput and decrease CPU utilization.  Jumbo frames can better exploit Gigabit Ethernet and offer great enhancements to the virtualized environment by utilizing the bandwidth more effectively while lowering processor overhead. This thesis shows a network performance improvement of 4.7% in a Xen virtualized environment by using jumbo frames.  Additionally the thesis examines TCP's performance in Xen and compares Xen with the same operations running on a native Linux system. / Den kraftiga ökningen i datormoln är på grund av dess kostnadseffektiva fördelar och den snabba skalbarhet av datorresurser, och kärnan i detta är virtualisering. Virtualiseringsteknik möjliggör att man kan köra era operativsystem på en enda fysisk maskin. Detta ökar effektiviteten av hårdvaran, vilket gör att kostnaden minskar för datormoln. Men eftersom lasten i gästoperativsystemet ökar, gör att de fysiska resurserna inte kan stödja alla program på ett effektivt sätt. In-och utgångstjänster, speciellt nätverksapplikationer, måste dela samma totala bandbredd gör att denna delning kan påverkas negativt av virtualisering. Nätverkspaket kan genomgå ytterligare behandling och måste vänta tills den virtuella maskinen är planerad av den underliggande hypervisor innan den slutliga services applikation, till exempel en webbserver. I en virtuell miljö är det inte belastningen (på grund av behandlingen av användarens data) utan nätverket overhead, som är det största problemet. Moderna nätverkskort har förbättrat nätverk virtualisering genom att hantera IP-paket mer intelligent genom TCP- segmenterings avlastning, avbrotts sammansmältning och genom en annan hårdvara som är specifik för virtualisering. Jumboramar har länge föreslagits för sina fördelar i traditionell miljö. De ökar nätverk genomströmning och minska CPU-användning. Genom att använda Jumbo frames kan Gigabit Ethernet användandet förbättras samt erbjuda stora förbättringar för virtualiserad miljö genom att utnyttja bandbredden mer effektivt samtidigt sänka processor overhead. Det här examensarbetet visar ett nätverk prestandaförbättring på 4,7% i en Xen virtualiserad miljö genom att använda jumbo frames. Dessutom undersöker det TCP prestanda i Xen och jämför Xen med samma funktion som körs på en Linux system.

Industrial control systems are applied in many areas e.g., motion control for industrial robotics, process control of large plants such as in the area of oil and gas, and in large national power grids. Since the last decade with advancement and adoption of virtualization and multicore technology (e.g., Virtual Monitoring Machine, cloud computing, server virtualization, application virtualization), IT systems, automation industries have benefited from low investment, effective system management and high service availability. However, virtualization and multicore technologies have posed a serious challenge to real-time systems, which is violating timeliness and predictability of real-time application running on control systems. To address the challenge, we have extended a real-time component-based framework with virtual nodes; and evaluated the framework in the context of virtualized multicore environment. The evaluation is demonstrated by modeling and implementing an orchestra application with QoS for CPU, memory and network bandwidth. The orchestra application is a real-time and distributed application deployed on virtualized multicore PCs connected with speakers. The result shows undistorted orchestra performance played through speakers connected to physical computer nodes. The contribution of the thesis can be considered: 1) extending a real-time component-based framework, Future Automation Software Architecture (FASA) with virtual nodes using Virtual Computation Resource (VCR) and 2) design and installation of reusable test environment for development, debugging and testing of real-time application on a network of virtualized multicore environment. / Vinnova project “AUTOSAR for Multi-Core in Automotive and Automation Industries “