The Olive Project (CMU, olivearchive.org)
Olive (Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution (Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution)
Observations:
A strength: use streaming for remote VM execution (called "Internet Suspend/Resume"), so a user can interact with a VM before the entire VM is downloaded, similar to Internet video.
- Also related with Brown Dog's DAP. Only client software is available, server software not released yet. Might be usable for extractors that require a special OS/software environment. Software only available for Linux. Software may not be mature enough. June 2013 presentation listed "thin-client execution in OpenStack" as a future work item.
- Good overview presentation: May 2013, presented to Library of Congress, "Not a Graveyard: The Olive Archive Project". Good technical presentation of the client software VMNetX: June 2013, "Building VMNetX with qemu and libvirt".
What is it
A collaborative (originally between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and IBM Research) project seeking to establish a robust ecosystem for long-term preservation of software, games and other executable content. Born at CMU, Olive addresses the current gap in preservation technology by providing a curated environment for the preservation and distribution of executable content.
-- From olivearchive.org
Executable content examples: simulation models, tutoring systems, expert systems, data visualization tools, company's product information page that are dynamically generated that customizes the content and appearance at run time.
Goals
- Enable libraries to achieve their mission of preserving scholarly records
- Provide a platform for preserving, searching, extending, and distributing executable content
- Establish a workflow for this preservation
- Determine the obstacles to preservation and distribution
- Retain executable content in its original state so that end users may interact with it freely
Team
- Prof. Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya), in CS, CMU
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Curator for Executable Content, CMU
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Funding
- IMLS National Leadership Grant (Institute of Museum and Library Services, a government agency)
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Goal: To develop the technical framework for Olive, to plan for an effective organizational structure to sustain the archive and provide access to executable content.
Test cases
- Great American History Machine
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Special issue of the Elsevier journal which will include executable content
How It Works
- Executable content is preserved in a full VM to ensure long-term compatibility
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- Users may save VM changes to their own computers and apply them to subsequent launches.
Software
- Client: VMNetX.
Runs on Linux, using the open-source KVM VM monitor. Can execute VMs directly from any web server; no special server software is required. On GitHub. License: GPL v2. https://github.com/cmusatyalab/vmnetx
- Server: not released, plan to release under GPL v2.
Client releases: VMNetX
0.4.4 - bugfix release, 2014-05-31.
0.4.3 2014-03-05.
0.4.2 2013-12-20.
0.4.1 2013-11-07.
Three main ideas
- ISR (Internet Suspend/Resume). A technology to stream VMs over Internet. -- From CMU.
Disk is demand-paged over the network.
- A technique for indexing and searching VM image contents. Searching relies on signature matching, instead of user-specified metadata.
- A technique to incrementally composing a VM image.