Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Kent David Forschmiedt

Eden Grail Adogla

Deepak Suryanarayanan

David Everard Brown

George Oliver Jenkins

Kevin A Tegtmeier

Matthew David Klein

Matthew Douglas Hendel

Nicholas Patrick Wilt

Eugene Michael Farrell

Thomas Christopher Rizzo

Jacques Joshua Richard

Kevin Michael Dzierwinski

Travis Steven Pepper

Lisa Huang

Girish Anand

In certain embodiments, a computer-implemented method includes accessing user selection data that includes selections associated with computing system resources, determining two or more machine image layers from available machine image layers to instantiate on a particular computing system resource, and determining that a particular machine image layer is not cached locally on one or more memory devices of the particular computing system resource. The method includes, in response to determining that the particular machine image layer is not cached locally on one or more memory devices, accessing a stored copy of the particular machine image layer residing in memory external to the particular computing system resource and caching the stored copy of the particular machine image layer on the one or more memory devices of the particular computing system resource. The method further includes instantiating the particular machine image layer on the particular computing system resource.

Layered machine images

A service management system prepares computing resources for use before a client requests the resource. For example, a service management system of a provider may restore an operating system image to a volume. The service management may then assign a processing resource to the volume to form a virtual machine. The service management system may cause the processing resource to finish preparation of the operating system on the volume. The service management system may disconnect the resulting staged volume from the processing resource. The staged volume may remain active in the low-latency data store and be added to a list of available staged volumes having the operating system. When a client requests a virtual machine having an operating system, the service management system may determine that the client receives the staged volume as part of the virtual machine to avoid the start-up costs of preparing a volume.

Resource prestaging

A method and apparatus for testing a communication link are disclosed. In the method and apparatus, a routing loop is established between two devices connected by the communication link, and data is routed between the two devices over the communication link. One or more performance measures of the communication link are obtained based at least in part on the data routing. The one or more performance measures are then used to determine whether the communication link is defective.

Routing loop for testing a communication link

A virtual machine environment in which a hypervisor provides direct memory mapped access by a virtual guest to a physical memory device. The hypervisor prevents reading from, writing to, or both, any individual register or registers while allowing unrestricted access to other registers, and without raising any abnormal condition in the guest's execution environment. For example, in one embodiment, the hypervisor can apply memory access protection to a memory page containing a restricted register so that a fault condition can be raised. When an instruction is executed, the hypervisor can intercept the fault condition and emulate the faulting guest instruction. When the emulation accesses the restricted address, the hypervisor can selectively decide whether or not to perform the access.

Selective restrictions to memory mapped registers using an emulator

A proxy operating inside of a virtual machine that is responsible for receiving user-specified configuration information, such as credentials, and updating the configuration of the virtual machine with the user-specified values at the time of assigning the virtual machine to a user. Once the proxy updates the configuration of the virtual machine, the virtual machine is assigned the user that provided the user configuration information and the proxy can deactivate or uninstall itself from the virtual machine, such as by deleting all files, registry entries and other traces of execution.

Proxy for injecting configuration information

Methods and arrangements are provided that substantially reduce the requisite amount of data required to conduct postmortem analysis following a computer failure. The methods and arrangements can be advantageously configured to allow for rapid online user support for a variety of users, computing devices, operating systems, applications, and the like. One method includes determining when to generate a dump file, and generating a dump file by gathering thread, callstack and thread context information for the running thread, process identifying information associated with the running thread, and information identifying the reason for generating the dump file. The resulting dump file is then stored to a storage medium and accessed during subsequent analysis. The dump file can be a kernel minidump file that is associated with an operating system program failure, in which case the running thread is the single thread that was running when the failure occurred. The kernel minidump file would include the kernel callstack and the process identifying information that would identify the process that initiated the single thread. The method is further applicable to non-operating system programs, wherein a user minidump file is generated by also gathering callstack information for all running threads, thread context information for all running threads, and a listing of all loaded modules for the faulting non-operating system program.

Method and arrangements for generating debugging information following software failures

Growing community of inventors

Shoreline, WA, United States of America

Kent David Forschmiedt