The Future
| This chapter provided a summary of the present state of UML and its user community. This book will also describe what I have planned for the future of UML and what those plans mean for its users. Among the plans is a project to port UML into the host kernel so that it runs inside the kernel rather than in a process. With some restructuring of UML, breaking it up into independent subsystems that directly use the resources provided by the host kernel, this in-kernel UML can be used for a variety of resource limitation applications such as resource control and jailing. This will provide highly customizable jailing, where a jail is constructed by combining the appropriate subsystems into a single package. Processes in such a jail will be confined with respect to the resources controlled by the jail, and otherwise unconfined. This structure of layering subsystems on top of each other has some other advantages as well. It allows them to be nested, so that a user confined within a jail could construct a subjail and put processes inside it. It also allows the nested subsystems to use different algorithms than the host subsystems. So, a workload with unusual scheduling or memory needs could be run inside a jail with algorithms suitable for it. However, the project I'm most excited about is using UML as a library, allowing other applications to link against it and thereby gain a captive virtual machine. This would have a great number of uses:
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