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:
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.
