article

A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization

Authors:

Ole AgesenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 40, Issue 5

Pages 2 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/1168917.1168860

Published: 20 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Until recently, the x86 architecture has not permitted classical trap-and-emulate virtualization. Virtual Machine Monitors for x86, such as VMware ® Workstation and Virtual PC, have instead used binary translation of the guest kernel code. However, both Intel and AMD have now introduced architectural extensions to support classical virtualization.We compare an existing software VMM with a new VMM designed for the emerging hardware support. Surprisingly, the hardware VMM often suffers lower performance than the pure software VMM. To determine why, we study architecture-level events such as page table updates, context switches and I/O, and find their costs vastly different among native, software VMM and hardware VMM execution.We find that the hardware support fails to provide an unambiguous performance advantage for two primary reasons: first, it offers no support for MMU virtualization; second, it fails to co-exist with existing software techniques for MMU virtualization. We look ahead to emerging techniques for addressing this MMU virtualization problem in the context of hardware-assisted virtualization.

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A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 40, Issue 5

Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

December 2006

425 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/1168917

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS XII: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
October 2006
440 pages
ISBN:1595934510
DOI:10.1145/1168857
General Chair:
John Paul Shen
Intel Corp.
,
Program Chair:
Margaret R. Martonosi
Princeton University

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 20 October 2006

Published in SIGOPS Volume 40, Issue 5

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