Speculative Execution as an Operating System Service

Software faults and vulnerabilities continue to present significant obstacles to achieving reliable and secure software. In an effort to overcome these obstacles, systems often incorporate self-monitoring and self-healing functionality. Our hypothesis is that internal monitoring is not an effective long-term strategy. However, monitoring mechanisms that are completely external lose the advantage of application-specific knowledge available to an inline monitor. To balance these tradeoffs, we present the design of VxF, an environment where both supervision and automatic remediation can take place by speculatively executing 'slices' of an application. VxF introduces the concept of an endolithic kernel by providing execution as an operating system service: execution of a process slice takes place inside a kernel thread rather than directly on the system microprocessor