This weekend’s back-to-basics reading is on operating system virtualization. There are two papers that deserve the “classic” tag as they both form the basis for operating system virtualization that is in production today. Stanford’s Disco, the predecessor of VMWare, uses a full hardware virtualization approach, where Cambridge’s Xen introduced us to paravirtualization.

Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors by Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, Kinshuk Govil, Mendel Rosenblum in the Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 5-8, 1997, St. Malo, France.

Xen and the art of virtualization by Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Timothy L. Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield, in the Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY USA.