Extensible Virtual Machines

Virtual machines (VMS) have enjoyed a resurgence as a way of allowing the same application program to be used across a range of computer systems. This flexibility comes from the abstraction that the VM provides over the native interface of a particular computer. However, this also means that the application is prevented from taking the features of particular physical machines into account in its implementation.

This dissertation addresses the question of why, where and how it is useful, possible and practicable to provide an application with access to lower-level interfaces. It argues that many aspects of VM implementation can be devolved safely to untrusted applications and demonstrates this through a prototype which allows control over run-time compilation, object placement within the heap and thread scheduling. The proposed architecture separates these application-specific policy implementations from the application itself. This allows one application to be used with different policies on different systems and also allows naïve or premature optimizations to be removed.