Running multiple VM on one image

Martin Luptak mlu at whitestein.com
Tue Dec 14 09:21:22 UTC 1999


Stephen,

the main idea of running multiple VM on one image is a multiuser acces
to one image. There would be one VM per user, each process is owned by
somebody. I've been thinking about multiple images (each one running
with its own VM), but there's problem with shared stuff. I would like to
avoid replication of classes, because this would rapidly increase the
size of image. If there would be lots of users, this might be critical
(almost everybody need to use GUI and kernel classes). Other benefit
would be preemptive multiprocessing (of course just between users),
better load balancing (if there's multiprocessor architecture) and fail
proof of the whole system (in the case of process failure there would be
just one VM to fail). So the question is: is it possible to run more
than one VM on one image (like shared memory between threads or
something like this) and mapping different Smalltalk processes to
different VMs (on VM startup for a user, only processes assigned to this
user will be restarted).
Is there someone attempting this or something similar?

Martin.





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