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Covirt: Lightweight Fault Isolation and Resource Protection for Co-Kernels

The challenges of the exascale era have generated a number of advancements in HPC systems software, with co-kernel architectures emerging as one such novel approach for HPC operating system and runtime (OS/R) design. Cokernels function by running multiple specialized, lightweight OS kernels natively on the same host as a general purpose OS/R. These specialized kernels are able to provide optimized OS/R environments for HPC applications while still retaining access to the full feature set of the co-running general purpose OS/R. While co-kernels are able to effectively optimize for performance, they generally lack effective mechanisms for cross OS/R fault isolation and resource protection. In this paper we present Covirt, a lightweight OS/R protection layer that leverages the hardware virtualization features found on modern CPUs. Covirt interposes a minimal hypervisor layer between a co-kernel OS/R and hardware to prevent OS level faults from impacting other OS/Rs running on the same system. Covirt is different from other virtualization-based approaches due to the level of integration necessary between the co-kernel instances, requiring the support of higher level semantic interfaces between the different OS/Rs. Covirt features a split architecture consisting of a hypervisor and controller module that continuously monitors changes to the underlying resource partitioning and translates those events to hypervisor configuration changes. We have implemented a prototype of Covirt in the context of the Hobbes exascale OS/R stack, specifically targeting the Pisces co-kernel framework and Kitten Lightweight Kernel. Our evaluation shows that Covirt is able to add fault isolation for memory and interrupt processing with minimal performance overheads.