Hardware virtualization
General Idea
Virtualization is an extension of
the core idea in computer science of abstracting resources, abstracting to the
point of the software being unable to directly talk to the hardware in any way.
With complete abstraction of the hardware allows for completely separate
processing streams to run at the same time without interfering, essentially
multiple
Proper virtualization is defined by Popek and Goldberg in their 1974 article “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures”[1] and presents the following qualifiers:
Modern day implementations adhere to parts 1 and 2, but part 3 has been modified to be a judgment of efficiency.
While virtualization has been implemented successfully in software it incurs the associated software delay. A now viable alternative is hardware based virtualization.
Hardware Virtualization:
While many hardware architectures, first starting with the IBM 7044[2] in the mid 60’s, were designed with hardware virtualization in mind, the x86 line was not. Recently, both AMD and Intel have added their own virtualization options to their processors, in their own proprietary way.
AMD-V
AMD-V starts with the IOMMU, the on chip virtualization module. It rests on the HyperTransport and intercepts a specific range of address requests. When the resident OS writes “0b” to the IOMMU Control Register, IOMMU is activated. The OS then sets up the guest OS’s address space by specifying the start of the space, and it’s length. Next it sets up an internal interrupt table mask which is used to specify the guest OS’s available interrupts. For each interrupt the host OS can specify whether it should be allowed, or whether it should cause a switch back to the host OS. This is combined with a set of registers passed back to the host OS with information about the last call. Lastly the host switches the Control Register is set to “1b” switching the possessor to ring level -1. All of the host’s registers are saved and swapped for the guests. The floating point stack isn’t swapped however. Instead a separate entry is added to the interrupt redirection table. This allows for the floating point stack only to be switched out if needed, saving time.[3]
Intel VT-i
The Intel VT technology shares most features, but with different implementation details. VT has an additional call to allow for the guest OS to tell what it’s interrupt indirection table is, if it’s allowed in the interrupt table. There is also a separate bitmap for each of the chips registers that can be separately set by the host OS. When the CPU switch back to the guest OS, an interrupt can be triggered to tell the internal OS that it has been switched back to. There is also an added bitarray which the processor uses to allow for multiple virtual OS recursion. A group of interrupts is then hard coded into the CPU, which when called then passes focus back to the previous OS, removing the last entry from the bit array. This is handled by the Intel PAL architecture, which also handles the pushing and popping of the processor state.[4]
-By Ben Hartman, for CS 441