Advisors:

ii MacroComponents defined as software components that run in isolated environ-ments but without the full foundations of the traditional software stack is an alternative, lightweight and composable approach to virtualization. GuestVM, which is a bare-metal, meta-circular Java Virtual Machine, is the core of the MacroComponents in this work. It sits directly between Xen hypervisor and OSGi applications to play a role as an operating system as well as a JVM. GuestVM has the potential for good performance because of its minimal, all-Java software stack and the elimination of traditional operating system layer. Nevertheless, GuestVM performs very poor in reality according to the previous work. The main aim of this work is to analyze and figure out the performance bottlenecks and remove them to improve GuestVM’s performance, and thus make it a possible solution for MacroComponents in practice. Through the evaluations, GuestVM does not add overhead to Maxine in term