[ethereal]

Speaking as a student studying systems (particularly security and OS development) . . . the second point sounds really interesting.

Recently I've been working on a simple microkernel (called Sydi) that should actually make this possible. It's a distributed system straight down to the kernel: when two instances of the kernel detect each other running on a network, they freely swap processes and resources between each other as required to balance the load. This is a nightmare from a security perspective, of course, and I haven't figured out the authentication bits yet -- too busy working on an AML interpreter because I don't like ACPICA -- but that's not the issue here. (It's far from finished, but I'm pretty confident that I've worked out the first 85% of the details, with just the remaining 115% left, plus the next 95% of the programming . . .)

Due to some aspects of its design (asynchronous system calls via message-passing, transparent message routing between nodes in the network, etc) I feel that it will be entirely possible to take a snapshot of an entire cluster of machines running the kernel. It would be expensive -- requiring a freeze of all running processes while the snapshot is taking place to maintain any level of precision -- but I'm confident I could code that in during the space of a week or two . . .

I haven't thought much about what kind of analysis one could do on the instrumentation/snapshot results, though. I'm sadly too inexperienced with `real-world' systems stuff to be able to say. Anyone have any suggestions for possible analysis avenues to explore?

[pi18n]

This sounds interesting! Have you published anything more substantial on it? I yearn for the day when I can have a Plan 9-ish resource sharing and file system connecting my personal computer to my cloud computers.

[verma7]

> It would be expensive -- requiring a freeze of all running processes while the snapshot is taking place to maintain any level of precision.

Have you thought about distributed algorithms like the Chandy-Lamport Snapshot algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_algorithm) that take a consistent snapshot and do not require a system freeze?

[eli_gottlieb]

This is a nightmare from a security perspective, of course

Well, only because you're trusting your hardware. Most people take that on faith anyway.

If you're willing to trust the hardware, I'm fairly sure software-based isolation and security is relatively doable.