《Block Mason》.pdfVIP

Block Mason ∗† † ‡ Dutch T. Meyer , Brendan Cully , Jake Wires , Norman C. Hutchinson† and Andrew Warfield† ‡ † Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia ‡ Citrix, Inc Abstract services can be constructed. With knowledge of the se- mantics of I/O request streams, [1, 10] this list grows Hardware virtualization gives administrators the further to include capabilities traditionally reserved for flexibility to rapidly create, destroy and relocate vir- file systems [9]. But in spite of the significant benefits tual machines across physical hosts. Unfortunately, the and wide applicability of such services, they have not storage systems upon which these systems depend are been broadly adopted. not nearly as agile. To facilitate the rapid, safe de- velopment of block devices that can meet the needs For developers, the attractive simplicity of the block of virtual machines, we present the Block Mason vir- interface is obscured by the difficulty of kernel pro- tual block device framework. Although the block de- gramming. Kernel extension writing is dangerous vice interface is simple and intuitive, block devices and o