Today's applications typically target high-level runtime systems and frameworks. At the same time, the operating systems on which they run are themselves increasingly being deployed on top of (hardware) virtual machines. These trends are enabling applications to be written, tested, and deployed more quickly, while simplifying tasks such as checkpointing, providing fault-tolerance, enabling data and computation migration, and making better, more power-efficient use of hardware infrastructure.

However, much current work on virtualization still focuses on running unmodified legacy systems and most higher-level runtime systems ignore the fact that they are deployed in virtual environments. The workshop on Runtime Environments, Systems, Layering, and Virtualized Environments (RESoLVE'12) aims to brings together researchers in both the OS and language level virtual machine communities to exchange ideas and experiences and to discuss how these separate layers can take advantage of each others' services.

The aim of the workshop is to discuss work-in-progress research around how these layers interact and complement each other, and how best to support new software architectures:
* better structuring / communication of services and divisions of labor
* trade-offs in the boundary between trusted and untrusted bases and mechanisms to provide information / feedback across the layers
* approaches for particular services (e.g. memory management / garbage collection / synchronization / signalling / scheduling)
* prototypes demonstrating combinations of SW- and HW-based techniques to provide better isolation, scaling, and quality-of-service
* enable legacy systems to more readily take advantage of new hardware and software capabilities through virtual appliances and services
* visualization / introspection techniques for understanding the resulting systems

The RESoLVE'12 workshop will be co-located with ASPLOS 2012 in London, UK. The goal is to complement the larger discussion at ASPLOS and VEE.

The RESoLVE'12 workshop will be the second in the series, following on from the success of the RESoLVE'11 workshop last year.