Course Syllabus

Table of contents

Course Overview
Course Goals
Things You’ll Learn
Topics
Prerequisites
Lectures
Textbooks
Grading
1. Late work policy
Exams
Academic Integrity
Disability Accommodations
Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Information
Academic Integrity
Disability Accommodations
Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Information
Similar Courses at Other Institutions

Course Overview

Virtual machines have transformed the ways in which we build, manage, and interact with modern computer systems. A great deal of the network packets that you send as you sit at your computer are handled by virtual machines that may move to another side of the world in a matter of hours. If you have an Android phone, every application you launch executes in a virtual machine. Have you written a Java or Python program lately? It couldn’t run without a virtual machine sitting underneath it. VMs have enabled new development practices for production applications, mobile applications, web applications, and operating system kernels. They allow datacenter operators to more efficiently provision hardware resources, saving money and energy. They allow service providers to quickly react to failures in an efficient and clean way. They enable the construction of portable and platform-agnostic programming languages by decoupling applications from the hardware on which they run. While VMs have been around since the early 1970s, modern developments, from cloudlets to containers, are only increasing the utility of virtualization technologies. One can expect that their importance and relevance will only increase.

This means that a basic understanding of the technological foundations underlying virtual machines should be part of any computer scientist’s repertoire. This course will draw back the curtains and expose the magic that makes various types of VMs work. By the end of the course, you will have a deep understanding of hypervisors, system virtualization, machine emulation, language virtual machines, binary translators, virtual resource management, and more. You will gain exposure to a real-world hypervisor code-base. Furthermore, you will actually build a virtual machine and develop an intuition for using VMs to solve problems. The course will involve lectures, written assignments, involved programming projects, and discussions of foundational research papers.

Course Goals

The goals for this course will be for you to develop a deep understanding of various types of virtualization techniques, their advantages and disadvantage, and to be able to apply them in a practical setting. You will be able to build basic VM constructs and understand how to evaluate them. You will therefore be expected to strengthen your system programming skills. You will also learn about new and upcoming technologies related to virtualization. In general, you will learn about the following topics (and potentially others):

General resource virtualization: virtual memory, virtualized CPUs, OS abstractions
Basic Virtual Machines and historical context. Formal requirements for virtual machines
Emulation: interpretation and binary translation
Language VMs and Process VMs: JVM, Python, .NET CLR, Android’s Dalvik JVM, VCODE, JIT compilation
Full system virtualization: Type I & II VMMs, paravirtualization, device virtualization
Virtualization in practice: virtual resource management, live migration, memory ballooning, fault tolerance
Network virtualization: virtual overlays, bridged networking, NAT, software-defined networks
Virtual storage: storage virtualization, virtual disk formats, copy-on-write formats
Advanced topics in virtualization: hardware assisted virtualization, overheads of virtualization, performant VMs, interrupt virtualization, self-virtualizing devices, security, introspection, the semantic gap
Current and future directions and research: VMMs as microkernels, Unikernels, chroot, jails, containers, cloudlets, virtual appliances

Things You’ll Learn

You will gain an understanding of the motivation for virtual machines and the history of their development
You will learn about the different types of virtual machine architectures and their applications
You will learn about full system virtualization as it is used in practice
You will gain an understanding of the nuts and bolts that make modern cloud-based services such as Amazon AWS work
You will get extensive experience developing virtual machine architectures. This experience will range from low-level kernel programming to implementing interpreters for high-level languages and emulators for instruction set architectures
You will gain experience navigating and understanding a real-world hypervisor code-base
You will learn about current and future topics in virtualization

Topics

Computer architecture review (3 hours)
Virtualization Foundations and Theory (3 hours)
Full System Emulation (6 hours)
Process Virtual Machines (4 hours)
High-level Language Virtual Machines (9 hours)
System Virtualization (9 hours)
Virtual Machine Management (3 hours)
Network Virtualization (3 hours)
Lightweight Virtualization and Containers (3 hours)
Virtualization Performance and Optimizations (1.5 hours)
Current and Future directions (1.5 hours)

Prerequisites

You must have taken CS 351 and CS 450. I will only waive this requirement in truly exceptional cases—this will be a challenging course, and you will need to already be quite familiar with the fundamentals of operating systems. I also recommend having taken CS 551 and CS 470 or 570 (computer architecture). You should be comfortable (ideally proficient) with programming in C. I won’t take time to cover basic C programming.

Lectures

It is critical you attend class sessions. We will Start out on Zoom, but after that we will meet in Wishnick Hall 116, barring any changes by the University administration.

Textbooks

The following book is the only required textbook for this course. If you plan on pursuing computer systems seriously, it is a great book to have as a reference:

Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes (1st Edition), by Jim Smith and Ravi Nair, 2005 Morgan Kaufmann.

Grading

Your grade will be based mostly on the course projects.

Your grade will be computed according to these criteria:

10% Attendance and Participation
70% Projects
20% Project Presentations

For internet and India sections, the grade break-down is:

80% Projects
20% Project Presentations (you can send me a recording)

Late work policy

Each day assignment is late, it will incur a 10% penalty. If an assignment is more than 5 days late, it will not be accepted, and you will receive a zero.

Exams

There will be no exams for this course.

Academic Integrity

You are allowed to discuss your work with others in the class, but ultimately what you submit must be solely yours. Cheating, plagiarism, copying from other students, or any other sort of academic dishonesty may result in you getting a zero on the assignment, may impact your grade negatively, and may result in refurral to the Dean.

Please see IIT’s code of Academic Honesty here.

Disability Accommodations

Reasonable accommodations will be made for students with documented disabilities. In order to receive accommodations, students must obtain a letter of accommodation from the Center for Disability Resources. The Center for Disability Resources (CDR) is located in Life Sciences Room 218, telephone (312) 567-5744 or disabilities@iit.edu.

Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Information

Illinois Tech prohibits all sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and gender discrimination by any member of our community. This includes harassment among students, staff, or faculty. Sexual harassment of a student by a faculty member or sexual harassment of an employee by a supervisor is particularly serious. Such conduct may easily create an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.

Illinois Tech encourages anyone experiencing sexual harassment or sexual misconduct to speak with the Office of Title IX Compliance for information on support options and the resolution process.

You can report sexual harassment electronically here, which may be completed anonymously. You may additionally report by contacting the Title IX Coordinator, Virginia Foster at foster@iit.edu or the Deputy Title IX Coordinator at eespeland@iit.edu.

For confidential support, you may reach Illinois Tech’s Confidential Advisor at (773) 907-1062. You can also contact a licensed practitioner in Illinois Tech’s Student Health and Wellness Center at student.health@iit.edu or (312)567-7550

For a comprehensive list of resources regarding counseling services, medical assistance, legal assistance and visa and immigration services, you can visit the Office of Title IX Compliance website.