Aiken et al: Deconstructing Process Isolation

Tags: papers, operating systems

Aiken, Mark, Manuel Fähndrich, Chris Hawblitzel, Galen Hunt, and James Larus. “Deconstructing Process Isolation.” In Proceedings of the 2006 Workshop on Memory System Performance and Correctness - MSPC ’06, 1. San Jose, California: ACM Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1145/1178597.1178599.

Operating systems usually enforce process isolation via hardware mechanisms, this paper compares the performance of a software isolated process

This took the form of isolated memory, CPU’s use memory management by limiting page access to specific processess, and privilege levels that prevent untrusted code from manipulating the page access code, this is related to TLBs, which make the overhead far too expensive

Main conclusion is that despite that process isolation is built into the OS, the issue of overhead makes it worth considering alternatives