Yes; and we may do some shared text support at some point. Not clear how much additional benefit comes from the "scanning" they did; a simpler approach to detect read-only sharing is to explicitly check for resident versions of a certain text segment across VMs. Having some "look-aside" in the block device interface (partic if also doing sharing at that level as per our current CoW implementation) might get considerable benefit for little cost.

Possibly. One challenge here is to maintain partitioning (hard guarantees) while providing sharing. Depending on how important isolation is to you, this is relatively less or more difficult.

Something we'll be considering post OSDI anyway..

cheers,

S.