Memory Virtualization for MIPS Processor Based Cloud Server

Abstract

Although the Loongson 3 processor, one representative of RISC processors based on MIPS64 instruction set, nowadays gains increasing focus and applications in Servers, memory virtualization, a critical part of a system virtual machine for such MIPS processor based Cloud Severs, meets challenges such as non-virtualizable instruction set architecture, without hardware assistant and addresses translation from guest virtual address (GVA) to host physical address (HPA) supports. However, there are few virtualization researches on MIPS processor based Cloud Server and practical virtual systems are much fewer. This paper introduces a shadow TLB based memory virtualization method. We summarize the challenges and present the key technologies such as the memory architecture, address space construction and mapping mechanism, the shadow TLB maintenance method, etc. Experimental results show that our approach can provide effective memory virtualization support for MIPS processor based Cloud Servers.