| Transparent Paravirtualization And The Proposed Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) |
| Thursday, 11 May 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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Today's x86 virtualization products have typically focused on faithfully emulating virtual hardware devices so that completely unmodified "guest" operating systems can install and run without any knowledge that they are in a virtual machine. Paravirtualization is a slightly different approach to running virtual machines that is getting attention as of late (such as these news.com, linuxvirtualization.com, and theregister.com articles). In paravirtualization, a guest operating system is aware that it is running inside of a virtual machine. Based on this awareness, the paravirtualized guest operating system executes different code paths that typically make the job of virtualization easier and more efficient. I'd like to use this entry to share some thoughts on paravirtualization and to provide some details about our proposed approach. We first discussed a proposed Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) at the Ottawa Linux Symposium in 2005, and the three main principles have remained the same: • High performance: The whole point of paravirtualization is to make virtualization as efficient as possible, and VMI is designed with this as an absolute requirement. • Transparent paravirtualization: We believe it's important that the same kernel binary can run on a physical machine and in a virtual machine. We feel that this is important for kernel maintainability, simplified Linux distributions, and reduced testing costs for ISVs, customers, and partners. • Hypervisor-independence: We believe that customers and partners will benefit from the ability to use the same paravirtualized kernel with different hypervisors. This is good for Linux and for customers because it allows innovation to continue rapidly both in the Linux kernel and in the hypervisors themselves. Read the rest here.
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