Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Pcanel/V2: A VMM Architecture Based on Intel VT-x
Authors	CHEN Wen-Zhi YAO Yuan YANG Jian-Hua HE Qin-Ming
Address	(College of Computer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027)
Year	2009
Issue	No.7(1311—1319)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract With the rapidly development of personal computer hardware, to construct multiple isolated computing domains through virtualization technology has already become a future direction of PC. To avoid the difficulties caused by implementing VMM on traditional IA-32 architecture through software virtualization technology, the authors designed and implemented a VMM based on Intel VT-x technology—Pcanel/V2. Pcanel/V2 utilizes the latest hardware virtualization technology to configure a controllable virtual execution environment and run multiple operating systems directly without any modification of source code. While the accesses to hardware resources by the guest operating system are monitored, various sensitive situations which occur in the guest operating system can also be handled correspondingly by Pcanel/V2. Concurrent execution of Linux and VxWorks on Pcanel/V2 has been realized and corresponding evaluation results show that Pcanel/V2 architecture simplifies the complexity of the design process while increasing the overall performance by approximately 10% compared to software virtual technology. Keywords virtualization; VT-x technology; virtual machine monitor; guest operating system; system isolation Background This work was partly supported by the Key Foundation Research and Development Program of China(973 Program) under Evaluating Theory and Means Research of Virtual Compute System(No.2007CB310906), the Foundation(Nos.A1420080190，9140A15040309JW0402, 9140A16070409JW0403,9140A06050609JW0402，2008ZH76007). The projects aim at developing the virtual platform supported by multiple architectures. The research belongs to virtualization technology area which is developed rapidly by many companies such as Microsoft, Intel and EMC and other open source projects such as Xen, KVM, QEMU and Denali. There are two kinds of virtualization technology: hardware virtualization technology and software virtualization technology. Hardware virtualization technology includes Intel VT technology and AMD Pacifica technology. Software virtualization technology includes full virtualization，para-virtualization and pre-virtualization. The virtualization technology is also an important portion of the 863 Program since 2007. The authors have engaged in several projects concerning virtualization technology and have developed a component-based embedded operating systems—Pcanel, which is based on component, middleware and real-time technologies and has the ability for configurability, reusability, adaptability, portability and robustibility. The previous research results also include three patents and four high quality papers. The research of this paper is about the hardware virtualization technology—A latest virtualization technology. This paper describes a VMM, called Pcanel/V2, which is based on the Pcanel and the Intel VT technology. The hardware virtualization technology is used to configure a controllable virtual execution environment, and to avoid changing the Guest OS source code while maintain a higher efficiency than traditional software virtualization technology. A control structure called VMCS of Pcanel/V2 is configured to construct a controllable environment for Guest OS. Pcanel/V2 can control the whole hardware rather than the Guest OS to deal with the resources management and can carry on corresponding processing for each kind of situation which appears in the guest operating system. Through Pcanel/V2, the authors have realized the basic purpose of hardware virtualization, and laid a foundation for further optimization for the future.