Neotextus

It looks like the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor is going to get a copy on write memory sub-system sometime soon, removing one of the few remaining performance limitations on the platform. Thanks to the work of researchers at UCSD which will be presented in a paper at this years ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, a copy-on-write memory sub-system has been developed for the Potemkin Virtual Honeyfarm. Whilst the existing implementation is specific to the honeyfarm, future versions should be able to provide a more general solution much like the similar VMware resource management capability. Having the ability to ‘flash clone’ a virtual machine potentially enables some radically new uses for virtual machines above and beyond the honeypot, particularly when combined with a copy on write filesystem like Parallax, such as the ability to “time-travel” by rolling back the state of a virtual machine to that prior to a failure or exploit.