Jones Optimality And Hardware Virtualization A Report On Work In Progress

The growing popularity of hardware virtualization (VMware and Xen being two prominent implementations) leads us to examine the common ground between this yet-again vibrant technology and partial evaluation. A virtual machine executes oil host hardware and presents to its guest program a replica of that host environment, complete with CPU, memory, and I/O devices. A virtual machine can be seen its a self-interpreter.A program specializer is considered Jones-optimal if it is capable of removing a layer of interpretational overhead. We propose a formulation of Jones optimality which coincides with a well-known virtualization efficiency criterion.A fully abstract programming language translation (an idea put forward by Abadi) is one that preserves program equivalences. We may translate a program by specializing a self-interpreter with respect to it. We argue that full abstraction for such translations captures the notion of transparency (whether or not a program can determine if it is running on a virtual machine) in virtual machine folklore.We hope that this discussion will encourage wider exchange of ideas between the virtualization and partial evaluation communities.