VAX/VMS internals and data structures
VAX/VMS internals and data structures
Global register allocation at link time
SIGPLAN '86 Proceedings of the 1986 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction
The IBM RT PC ROMP processor and memory management unit architecture
IBM Systems Journal
Register windows vs. register allocation
PLDI '88 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1988 conference on Programming Language design and Implementation
Virtualizing the VAX architecture
ISCA '91 Proceedings of the 18th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A Retrospective on the VAX VMM Security Kernel
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Performance of the VAX-11/780 translation buffer: simulation and measurement
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
A high-frequency custom CMOS S/390 microprocessor
IBM Journal of Research and Development - Special issue: IBM S/390 G3 and G4
Formal requirements for virtualizable third generation architectures
Communications of the ACM
A note on the confinement problem
Communications of the ACM
Crossing the machine interface
MICRO 15 Proceedings of the 15th annual workshop on Microprogramming
A comment on the confinement problem
SOSP '75 Proceedings of the fifth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Millicode in an IBM zSeries processor
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Devirtualizable virtual machines enabling general, single-node, online maintenance
ASPLOS XI Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Advanced virtualization capabilities of POWER5 systems
IBM Journal of Research and Development - POWER5 and packaging
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
Analysis of the Intel Pentium's ability to support a secure virtual machine monitor
SSYM'00 Proceedings of the 9th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 9
Constructing trusted virtual execution environment in P2P grids
Future Generation Computer Systems
Enhancing virtualized application performance through dynamic adaptive paging mode selection
Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Autonomic computing
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Virtualization has become much more important throughout the computer industry both to improve security and to support multiple workloads on the same hardware with effective isolation between those workloads. The most widely used chip architecture, the Intel and AMD x86 processors, have begun to support virtualization, but the initial implementations show some limitations. This paper examines the virtualization properties of the Alpha architecture with particular emphasis on features that improve performance and security. It shows how the Alpha's features of PALcode, address space numbers, software handling of translation buffer misses, lack of used and modified bits, and secure handling of unpredictable results all contribute to making virtualization of the Alpha particularly easy. The paper then compares the virtual architecture of the Alpha with Intel's and AMD's virtualization approaches for x86. It also comments briefly on Intel's virtualization technology for Itanium, IBM's zSeries and pSeries hypervisors and Sun's UltraSPARC virtualization. It particularly identifies some differences between translation buffers on x86 and translation buffers on VAX and Alpha that can have adverse performance consequences.