Design and implementation of a native interface for using native features on smart virtual machine

Abstract

Unlike physical systems consisting of hardware, virtual machines are conceptual computers in logical configurations made of software. Although programs implemented in virtual machine environments have platform-independent characteristics, their performance is low in terms of implementation speed and they cannot implement those parts that are dependent on the platform by themselves. In addition, they have the shortcoming of being unable to reuse those libraries and programs that are written in the native language. In the present paper, a study for provision of native interfaces of smart virtual machines (SVMs) is introduced. The native interfaces of existing systems were analyzed to define a native interface protocol for SVMs, an interface definition language and an interface generator were designed for effective use of the defined native interface protocol, and the operation of the implemented native interface was verified through experiments. The native interface proposed in the present paper consists of items and rules necessary for information transmission between virtual machine environments and native environments, interface definition files necessary to deliver information on native functions to virtual machines, and functions and data types necessary for native environment to receive information from virtual machine environments. Through such native interfaces, virtual machine environment developers can use environment-dependent function without modifying virtual machine environments. © 2015 SERSC.