Virtual machines, isolation and security

The central question

How can systems share hardware while protecting their boundaries?

First half

Hypervisors, guest and host relationships, CPU and memory virtualization, VMs versus containers.

Second half

Protection boundaries, privileges, permissions, least privilege, isolation failures and resource limits.

What you should be able to do

• Distinguish virtual machines from containers.
• Explain protection boundaries and apply least-privilege reasoning.

A concrete example

Compare application, guest-kernel, hypervisor and hardware boundaries with container isolation.

Reading reference

Operating System Concepts, 10th edition: Chapters 16–18. We use selected sections rather than every slide in each chapter.

Lecture materials

The slide PDF and illustrated reading are being prepared. Links will appear here when they are available.