SIMPLIFYING THE DEPLOYMENT AND SERVICEABILITY OF COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENTS

• US 20120330640A1
• Filed: 08/31/2012
• Published: 12/27/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 08/30/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Auerbach, Joshua S., Bala, Vasanth, Frauenhofer, Thomas V., George, Jobi, Mummert, Todd W., Pigott, Michael A., Alpem, Bowen L.
• Granted Patent: US 8,762,965 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 703/23
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/445 Program loading or initiating bootstrapping G06F9/4401; security arrangements for program loading or initiating G06F21/57
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/44521 Dynamic linking or loading; Link editing at or after load time, e.g. Java class loading
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45537 Provision of facilities of other operating environments, e.g. WINE I/O emulation G06F13/105
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/60 Digital content management, e.g. content distribution
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/06 specially adapted for file transfer, e.g. file transfer protocol [FTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/34 involving the movement of software or configuration parameters network booting or remote initial program loading [RIPL] G06F9/4416
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/3236 using cryptographic hash functions
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/3247 involving digital signatures
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/235 Processing of additional data, e.g. scrambling of additional data or processing content descriptors
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/435 Processing of additional data, e.g. decrypting of additional data, reconstructing software from modules extracted from the transport stream
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/812 involving advertisement data advertising per se G06Q30/02
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8173 End-user applications, e.g. Web browser, game
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8456 by decomposing the content in the time domain, e.g. in time segments

Abstract

An information processing system includes a preparation machine with an installed image; an execution machine on which the installed image is virtually installed; and a virtualizer for virtualizing the installed image on the execution machine to produce a virtually installed image by using a hierarchy of selective virtualizers, wherein the virtualizing is selective such that not all operations of the executing software of the installed image at any particular level are virtualized.

Claims

1. An information processing system comprising:

a preparation machine comprising an installed image;

an execution machine on which the installed image is virtually installed; and

a virtualizer virtualizing the installed image on the execution machine, producing a virtually installed image by using a hierarchy of selective virtualizers;

wherein the virtualizing is selective such that not all operations of executing software of the installed image at any particular level are virtualized;

wherein the virtualizing comprises steps of;

defining virtualization of the virtually installed image by characterizing a hierarchy and selectivity of the virtualization, such that said virtualization is both selective and hierarchical;

emulating on the execution machine a platform native to the preparation machine;

emulating on the execution machine a virtual machine of the application;

emulating on the execution machine other applications interacting with the application;

dividing software assets of the installed image into shards, said shards comprising variable size, semantically-determined pages;

executing the software assets on the execution machine as if said software assets were installed on said execution machine, wherein the executing step comprises;

intercepting requests at multiple levels; and

redirecting the requests to code that emulates the behavior of the application installed on the preparation machine; and

integrating the execution of the software assets with the virtualizers, such that execution information can be collected efficiently about execution problems on the execution machine.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the virtualizer further emulates on the execution machine a native platform of the preparation machine.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the virtualizer further emulates on the execution machine a virtual machine of the application.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein the virtualizer further emulates on the execution machine other applications interacting with the application.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the operation includes a read operation.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the operation includes any one of a write operation and an execute operation.

7. The system of claim 1 wherein the installed image comprises multiple semantic levels of an application and its non-operating system dependencies.

8. The system of claim 7 wherein each of the selective virtualizers is responsible for partially virtualizing different semantic levels of the application.

9. The system of claim 1 wherein virtualization occurs where needed and more than one selective virtualizer can be active in a process.

10. The system of claim 1 further comprising an associative backing store for storing the shards.

11. The system of claim 10 wherein the virtualizer further integrates the execution of the software assets with the associative backing store, such that software information about said software assets and their versions can be collected.