I did my PhD proposal denfense yesterday and now I am one more step closer to finish it. It took a week to just prepare the talk. The talk was long and have 45 slides. However, there are only about 8 slides for each project, since there are 4 projects. The talk lasts about 45 minutes. Because it is so long, everytime I practiced it, I almost lost my voice after I finished.

I am working on virtual machine cloning for security testing for the TCloud project. We are looking for an efficient and transparent virtual machine cloning technique that has minimal impact on the virtual machine to be cloned. After some investigation, we found that KVM supports live snapshot for both memory and disk state while Xen4.4 currently does not support this feature yet but could be patched to do live snapshot for memory state easily.

During the weekly technical forum within the NetApp ATG group, a team member presented the trip report for OSDI ‘14 this year. In his talk, he mentioned a paper that pushed me to think more in this line. The paper is about how to estimate the working set of a workload, using less memory and runs much faster. The only related work that dealt with the same problem was proposed more than 10 years ago and in that work, the authors tried to get the exact working set size, with a very high demand for memory and runtime.