Publication

It is time to reconsider memory protection. The emergence of large non-volatile main memories, scalable interconnects, and rack-scale computers running large numbers of small "micro services" creates significant challenges for memory protection based solely on MMU mechanisms. Central to this is a tension between protection and translation: optimizing for translation performance often comes with a cost in protection flexibility. We argue that a key-based memory protection scheme, complementary to but separate from regular page-level translation, is a better match for this new world. We present MaKC, a new architecture which combines two levels of capability-based protection to scale fine-grained memory protection at both user and kernel level to large numbers of protection domains without compromising efficiency at scale or ease of revocation.

@inproceedings{abc,
	abstract = {It is time to reconsider memory protection. The emergence of large non-volatile main memories, scalable interconnects, and rack-scale computers running large numbers of small "micro services" creates significant challenges for memory protection based solely on MMU mechanisms. Central to this is a tension between protection and translation: optimizing for translation performance often comes with a cost in protection flexibility.

We argue that a key-based memory protection scheme, complementary to but separate from regular page-level translation, is a better match for this new world. We present MaKC, a new architecture which combines two levels of capability-based protection to scale fine-grained memory protection at both user and kernel level to large numbers of protection domains without compromising efficiency at scale or ease of revocation.},
	author = {Reto Achermann and Chris Dalton and Paolo Faraboschi and Moritz Hoffmann and Dejan S. Milojicic and Geoffrey Ndu and Alexander Richardson and Timothy Roscoe and Adrian L. Shaw and Robert N. M. Watson},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems},
	title = {Separating Translation from Protection in Address Spaces with Dynamic Remapping},
	venue = {Whistler, BC, Canada},
	year = {2017}
}