Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Michael Engel

Description

Virtualisation is the basis of a significant part of the Internet infrastructure today. It is used in various different contexts, e.g., system-level virtualisation for co-hosting virtual machines in Cloud infrastructures.

This module discusses system-level virtualisation technologies on all layers of the hardware/software stack. Based on publications and real-world code examples, students will investigate different architectures of virtual machines and details of their system-level implementation. The design and implementation of virtualisation technologies will be analysed through the investigation of real-world open-source code examples for common hardware, such as x86, ARM and RISC-V.

Students are expected to be experiences with computer architecture (e.g., assembler programming and instruction sets, virtual memory, exception handling) and operating systems fundamentals (scheduling, synchronization, resource allocation, isolation) from a previous bachelor-level course (such as Inf-GRABS-B) as well as to have a solid knowledge of and experience in programming in a systems programming language such as C, C++, or Rust. There will be a self-assessment session in the first week of the semester to test your existing knowledge of these topics.