Both lightweight hardware mechanisms and zero-overhead language safety can be leveraged to enforce the isolation of subsystems, e.g., browser plugins, device drivers and kernel extensions, user-defined database and network functions, etc. However, as both technologies are still young, their relative advantages are still unknown.
In this work, we study the overheads of hardware and software isolation mechanisms with the goal to understand their relative advantages and disadvantages for fine-grained isolation of subsystems with tight performance budgets.
Publications
Zhaofeng Li, Tianjiao Huang, Vikram Narayanan, Anton Burtsev. Understanding the Overheads of Hardware and Language-Based IPC Mechanisms. In 11th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), October 2021. pdf
Code
- Coming soon …