VMTN Blog

Notes and video from this morning's keynote will arrive soon. VMware's Andy Tucker has already blogged about an exciting new technology that Mendel Rosenblum demoed this morning, and goes into a bit of detail about what's going on behind the scenes:

What was that again?.

This morning during his keynote address at VMworld Mendel Rosenblum talked about (and demoed) a new virtual machine monitor capability we've been playing with in VMware R&D, called record/replay.  The basic idea is to be able to record the instruction stream that a virtual machine executes and be able to reproduce it exactly at a later time.  This isn't just the instructions associated with a single application process or thread; it includes all code executed within a VM, including multiple processes, kernel code, and interrupt handlers.  ...

Personally as a kernel developer I've spent many hours staring at object code and remnants of register and kernel memory state and trying to deduce why a problem occurred, wishing I had a time machine that would allow me to back up and see the state of a given register before it was clobbered by unrelated code, or figure out what thread scribbled garbage onto a critical data structure. ...

You can also probably think of other uses for this technology - one that comes to mind is keeping a log of execution for analyzing security attacks.