Abstract

The growing adoption of hardware virtualization solutions (VMware and Xen being two prominent examples) leads us to examine the common ground between this yet-again vibrant technology and partial evaluation. A virtual machine executes on host hardware and presents to its guest program a replica of that host environment, complete with CPU , memory, and I/O devices. A virtual machine can be seen as a self-interpreter.

A program specializer is considered Jones-optimal if it is capable of removing a layer of interpretational overhead. Can efficient virtualization be understood in terms of Jones-optimal specialization?

A fully abstract programming language translation is one that preserves equivalences. Should a virtual machine be ``fully abstract’’?

We hope that this discussion will encourage wider exchange of ideas between the virtualization and partial evaluation communities.