Cloud environments host many tenants, and typically there
is substantial overlap between the application binaries and
libraries executed by tenants. Thus, memory de-duplication
can increase memory density by allocating memory for shared binaries only once. Existing de-duplication approaches, however, either rely on a shared OS to de-deduplicate binary objects, which provides unacceptably weak isolation; or exploit hypervisor-based de-duplication at the level of memory pages, which is blind to the semantics of the objects to be shared.
We describe Object Reuse with Capabilities (ORC), which
supports the fine-grained sharing of binary objects between
tenants, while isolating tenants strongly through a small
trusted computing base (TCB). ORC uses hardware sup-
port for memory capabilities to isolate tenants, which permits shared objects to be accessible to multiple tenants safely. Since ORC shares binary objects within a single address space through capabilities, it uses a new relocation type to create per-tenant state when loading shared objects. ORC supports the loading of objects by an untrusted guest, outside of its TCB, only verifying the safety of the loaded data. Our experiments show that ORC achieves a higher memory density with a lower overhead than hypervisor-based de-deduplication.