SNS COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY
COIMBATORE – 64035
Virtualization of CPU,
Memory and I/O devices
Department of MCA, SNS College of
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Technology
Hardware Support
Modern OS & processors permit multiple
processes to run simultaneously.
All processors have at least two modes, user
mode and supervisor mode
Instructions running in supervisor mode are
called privileged instructions.
Other instructions are unprivileged
instructions
VMware Workstation is a VM so?ware suite for
x86 and x86-64 computers
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a Linux
kernel virtualization infrastructure.
Department of MCA, SNS College of
2
Technology
CPU Virtualization
unprivileged instructions of VMs run directly
on the host machine
critical instructions should be handled
carefully
Three categories of critical instructions:
privileged instructions, control-sensitive
instructions, and behavior-sensitive
instructions
Privileged instructions execute in a privileged
mode and will be trapped if executed outside
this mode.
Department of MCA, SNS College of
3
Technology
CPU Virtualization
Control-sensitive instructions attempt to
change the configuration of resources used.
Behavior-sensitive instructions have different
behaviors depending on the configuration of
resources, including the load/store operations
over the virtual memory
RISC CPU architectures can be naturally
virtualized
x86 CPU architectures are not primarily
designed to support virtualization, because 10
sensitive instructions, are not privileged
instructions
Department of MCA, SNS College of
4
Technology
CPU Virtualization
A CPU architecture is virtualizable if it
supports the ability to run the VM’s privileged
and unprivileged instructions in the CPU’s user
mode while the VMM runs in supervisor mode.
When the privileged instructions including
control- and behavior-sensitiveinstructions of
a VM are executed, they are trapped in the
VMM
Department of MCA, SNS College of
5
Technology
Hardware assisted CPU Virtualization
Intel and AMD add an additional mode called
privilege mode level (some people call it Ring-1)
to x86 processors. Therefore, operating
systems can still run at Ring 0 and the
hypervisor can run at Ring -1.
All the privileged and sensitive instructions are
trapped in the hypervisor automatically.
This technique removes the difficulty of
implementing binary translation of full
virtualization
Department of MCA, SNS College of
6
Technology
Memory Virtualization
Intel hardware-assisted CPU virtualization
Department of MCA, SNS College of
7
Technology
Memory Virtualization
Virtual memory virtualization is similar to
virtual memory supported by modern OS
modern x86 CPUs include a memory
management unit (MMU) and a translation
lookaside buffer (TLB) to optimize virtual
memory performance.
Two-stage mapping process should be
maintained by the guest OS and the VMM,
respectively: virtual memory to physical
memory and physical memory to machine
memory.
Department of MCA, SNS College of
8
Technology
Memory Virtualization
Two-level memory mapping procedure
Department of MCA, SNS College of
9
Technology
Memory Virtualization
each page table of the guest OSes has a
separate page table in the VMM corresponding
to it, the VMM page table is called the shadow
page table
MMU already handles virtual-to-physical
translations as defined by the OS
VMware uses shadow page tables to perform
virtual-memory-to-machine-memory address
translation.
Processors use TLB hardware to map the
virtual memory directly tothe machine memory
to avoid the two levels of translation on every
access Department of MCA, SNS College of
Technology
10
I/O Virtualization
involves managing the routing of I/O requests
between virtual devices and the shared
physical hardware
three ways to implement I/O virtualization:
full device emulation
para-virtualization
direct I/O
Full device emulation: All the functions of a
device or bus infrastructure, such as device
enumeration, identification, interrupts, and
DMA, are replicated in software
Department of MCA, SNS College of
11
Technology
I/O Virtualization
Department of MCA, SNS College of
12
Technology
I/O Virtualization
para-virtualization: consisting of a frontend
driver and a backend driver.
The frontend driver is running in Domain U and
the backend driver is running in Domain 0.
The frontend driver manages the I/O requests
of the guest OSes
Backend driver is responsible for managingthe
real I/O devices and multiplexing the I/O data
of different VM
achieves better device performance than full
device emulation
Department of MCA, SNS College of
13
Technology
I/O Virtualization
Direct I/O virtualization: lets the VM access
devices directly.
It can achieve close-to- native performance
without high CPU costs.
self-virtualized I/O (SV-IO): All tasks
associated with virtualizing an I/O device are
encapsulated in SV-IO. It provides virtual
devices and an associated access API to VMs
and a management API to the VMM
defines one virtual interface (VIF) for every
kind of virtualized I/O device, such as virtual
network interfaces, virtual block devices
(disk), virtual camera devices, 14
