A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
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Virtualization has essentially transformed computing from conventional system architecture (of running particular operating systems on only selected platforms) to a more integrated architecture that facilitates the interoperability of applications, operating systems and hardware platforms. Virtualization has enabled cloud computing to be more of a utility-based computing where applications, platforms, storage and etc are provided as a service to the users over the Internet. The first half of the paper will provide an overview of virtual machines, virtual machine monitors (hypervisors) and the different virtualization architectures. After introducing virtual memory management from the standpoint of traditional computer architecture, we will describe in detail the virtualization of virtual memory address spaces and their implementation through shadow page table and nested page tables. Our discussion in this paper is based on the virtualization of memory address spaces that is currently supported by VMware Workstation and similar hypervisor products.