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Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew S. Tanenb...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf
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Modern Operating Systems by Herbert Bos and Andrew...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Modern Operating Systems by Herbert...
Modern_Operating_Systems_by_Herbert_Bos_and_Andrew_S._Tanenbaum_4th_Ed.pdf-M ODERN O PERATING S YSTEMS
Page 534
SEC. 7.12
CASE STUDY: VMWARE
503
safely, on the hardware. When this is not possible, one approach is to specify a vir-
tualizable subset of the processor architecture, and port the guest operating systems
to that newly defined platform.
This technique is known as paravirtualization
(Barham et al., 2003; Whitaker et al., 2002) and requires source-code level modifi-
cations of the operating system.
Put bluntly, paravirtualization modifies the guest
to avoid doing anything that the hypervisor cannot handle.
Paravirtualization was
infeasible at VMware because of the compatibility requirement and the need to run
operating systems whose source code was not available, in particular Windows.
An alternative would have been to employ an all-emulation approach. In this,
the instructions of the virtual machines are emulated by the VMM on the hardware
(rather than directly executed). This can be quite efficient; prior experience with
the SimOS (Rosenblum et al., 1997) machine simulator showed that the use of
techniques such as
dynamic binary translation
running in a user-level program
could limit overhead of complete emulation to a factor-of-five slowdown. Although
this is
quite
efficient, and certainly useful for simulation purposes, a factor-of-five
slowdown was clearly inadequate and would not meet the desired performance re-
quirements.
The solution to this problem combined two key insights. First, although trap-
and-emulate direct execution could not be used to virtualize the entire x86 archi-
tecture all the time, it could actually be used some of the time. In particular, it
could be used during the execution of application programs, which accounted for
most of the execution time on relevant workloads. The reasons is that these virtu-
alization sensitive instructions are not sensitive all the time; rather they are sensi-
tive only in certain circumstances. For example, the
POPF
instruction is virtu-
alization-sensitive when the software is expected to be able to disable interrupts
(e.g., when running the operating system), but is not virtualization-sensitive when
software cannot disable interrupts (in practice, when running nearly all user-level
applications).
Figure 7-8 shows the modular building blocks of the original VMware VMM.
We see that it consists of a direct-execution subsystem, a binary translation subsys-
tem, and a decision algorithm to determine which subsystem should be used. Both
subsystems rely on some shared modules, for example to virtualize memory
through shadow page tables, or to emulate I/O devices.
The direct-execution subsystem is preferred, and the dynamic binary transla-
tion subsystem provides a fallback mechanism whenever direct execution is not
possible. This is the case for example whenever the virtual machine is in such a
state that it could issue a virtualization-sensitive instruction. Therefore, each
subsystem constantly reevaluates the decision algorithm to determine whether a
switch of subsystems is possible (from binary translation to direct execution) or
necessary (from direct execution to binary translation). This algorithm has a num-
ber of input parameters, such as the current execution ring of the virtual machine,
whether interrupts can be enabled at that level, and the state of the segments. For
example, binary translation must be used if any of the following is true:
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