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Virtual machine
A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. A virtual machine was originally defined by Popek and Goldberg as "an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine". Current use includes virtual machines which have no direct correspondence to any real hardware.
Virtual machines are separated into two major categories, based on their use and degree of correspondence to any real machine. A system virtual machine provides a complete system platform which supports the execution of a complete operating system (OS). In contrast, a process virtual machine is designed to run a single program, which means that it supports a single process. An essential characteristic of a virtual machine is that the software running inside is limited to the resources and abstractions provided by the virtual machine—it cannot break out of its virtual world.
Process virtual machines
A process VM, sometimes called an application virtual machine, runs as a normal application inside an OS and supports a single process. It is created when that process is started and destroyed when it exits. Its purpose is to provide a platform-independent programming environment that abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system, and allows a program to execute in the same way on any platform.
A process VM provides a high-level abstraction — that of a high-level programming language (compared to the low-level ISA abstraction of the system VM). Process VMs are implemented using an interpreter; performance comparable to compiled programming languages is achieved by the use of just-in-time compilation.
This type of VM has become popular with the Java programming language, which is implemented using the Java virtual machine. Another example is the .NET Framework, which runs on a VM called the Common Language Runtime.
A special case of process VMs are systems that abstract over the communication mechanisms of a (potentially heterogeneous) computer cluster. Such a VM does not consist of a single process, but one process per physical machine in the cluster. They are designed to ease the task of programming parallel applications by letting the programmer focus on algorithms rather than the communication mechanisms provided by the interconnect and the OS. They do not hide the fact that communication takes place, and as such do not attempt to present the cluster as a single parallel machine.
Unlike other process VMs, these systems do not provide a specific programming language, but are embedded in an existing language; typically such a system provides bindings for several languages (e.g., C and FORTRAN). Examples are PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (Message Passing Interface). They are not strictly virtual machines, as the applications running on top still have access to all OS services, and are therefore not confined to the system model provided by the "VM".
System virtual machines
System virtual machines (sometimes called hardware virtual machines) allow the sharing of the underlying physical machine resources between different virtual machines, each running its own operating system. The software layer providing the virtualization is called a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware (Type 1 or native VM) or on top of an operating system (Type 2 or hosted VM).
The main advantages of system VMs are:
multiple OS environments can co-exist on the same computer, in strong isolation from each other the virtual machine can provide an instruction set architecture (ISA) that is somewhat different from that of the real machine application provisioning, maintenance, high availability and disaster recovery
The main disadvantage of system VMs is:
a virtual machine is less efficient than a real machine because it accesses the hardware indirectly Multiple VMs each running their own operating system (called guest operating system) are frequently used in server consolidation, where different services that used to run on individual machines in order to avoid interference are instead run in separate VMs on the same physical machine. This use is frequently called quality-of-service isolation (QoS isolation).
The desire to run multiple operating systems was the original motivation for virtual machines, as it allowed time-sharing a single computer between several single-tasking OSes. This technique requires a process to share the CPU resources between guest operating systems and memory virtualization to share the memory on the host.
The guest OSes do not have to be all the same, making it possible to run different OSes on the same computer (e.g., Microsoft Windows and Linux, or older versions of an OS in order to support software that has not yet been ported to the latest version). The use of virtual machines to support different guest OSes is becoming popular in embedded systems; a typical use is to support a real-time operating system at the same time as a high-level OS such as Linux or Windows.
Another use is to sandbox an OS that is not trusted, possibly because it is a system under development. Virtual machines have other advantages for OS development, including better debugging access and faster reboots.
Alternate techniques such as Solaris Zones provides a level of isolation within a single operating system. This does not have isolation as complete as a VM. A kernel exploit in a system with multiple zones will affect all zones. Achieving the same goal in a virtual machine implementation would require exploiting a weakness in the hypervisor. A hypervisor typically has a smaller "attack surface" than a complete operating system, making this more challenging. Further, a kernel exploit in a VM guest would not affect other VMs on the host, just as a successful intrusion into one zone would not necessarily affect other zones. Zones are not virtual machines, but an example of "operating-system virtualization". This includes other "virtual environments" (also called "virtual servers") such as Virtuozzo, FreeBSD Jails, Linux-VServer, chroot jail, and OpenVZ. These provide some form of encapsulation of processes within an operating system. These technologies have the advantages of being more resource-efficient than full virtualization and having better observability into multiple guests simultaneously; the disadvantage is that, generally, they can only run a single operating system and a single version/patch level of that operating system - so, for example, they cannot be used to run two applications, one of which only supports a newer OS version and the other only supporting an older OS version on the same hardware. However, Sun Microsystems has enhanced Solaris Zones to allow some zones to behave like Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 systems by adding a system call translator.
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Here is a screen capture of a Java applet to view Mandelbrot sets.
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| Kent Beck | |
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| Born | 1961 (age 50–51) |
| Citizenship | United States of America |
| Fields | Software engineering |
| Alma mater | University of Oregon |
| Known for | Extreme Programming, Software design patterns, JUnit |
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.
Kent Beck has an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Oregon. He has pioneered software design patterns, the rediscovery of test-driven development, as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. Beck popularized CRC cards with Ward Cunningham and along with Erich Gamma created the JUnit unit testing framework.
Did you know...
- ... that both the Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer browser designs are descended from the Mosaic web browser?
- ... that Netscape was the first web browser to support Java, other than Java's own HotJava Browser?
- ... that Java SE 6 is code-named Mustang?
- ... that Java Runtime Environment is found on over 700 million PCs?
- ... that in 2008 Hewlett-Packard created a prototype of the theoretical fourth and last passive circuit element, the memristor (first devised in 1971), that may one day revolutionize electronics?
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1. Who said: "There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written."?
2. When was Java first released?
3. Why is JavaScript thus named if it is essentially unrelated to Java?
4. Which was Java's original name: Green, Oak, Stealth, C++ ++ --, firstperson, Duke or Coffee?
5. True or False: An Interface can never be private or protected?
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(These articles are the ones recently identified as possibly Java-related but yet unconfirmed) This list was generated from these rules (ruleset version). Questions and feedback are always welcome! The search is being run manually, but eventually will run ~daily with the most recent ~7 days of results.
AlexNewArtBot archives | TedderBot archives | Rules | Match log and errors
- ATOMac | talk | history by Nagappan talk contribs started at 21:40, 10 October 2012, score: 15
- Eigenclass model | talk | history by Hundblue talk contribs started at 11:26, 10 October 2012, score: 15
- BatooJPA | talk | history by Hceylan talk contribs started at 13:18, 05 October 2012, score: 21
- JPOS | talk | history by AlejandroRevilla talk contribs started at 10:52, 04 October 2012, score: 26
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