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Table of contents (8 chapters)
About this book
This book focuses on the core question of the necessary architectural support provided by hardware to efficiently run virtual machines, and of the corresponding design of the hypervisors that run them. Virtualization is still possible when the instruction set architecture lacks such support, but the hypervisor remains more complex and must rely on additional techniques.
Despite the focus on architectural support in current architectures, some historical perspective is necessary to appropriately frame the problem. The first half of the book provides the historical perspective of the theoretical framework developed four decades ago by Popek and Goldberg. It also describes earlier systems that enabled virtualization despite the lack of architectural support in hardware.
As is often the case, theory defines a necessary—but not sufficient—set of features, and modern architectures are the result of the combination of the theoretical framework with insights derived frompractical systems. The second half of the book describes state-of-the-art support for virtualization in both x86-64 and ARM processors. This book includes an in-depth description of the CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization of these two processor architectures, as well as case studies on the Linux/KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisors. It concludes with a performance comparison of virtualization on current-generation x86- and ARM-based systems across multiple hypervisors.
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Dan Tsafrir is an Associate Professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His research interests are focused on practical aspects of operating systems, hardware-software interactions, virtualization, security, and performance evaluation. Some of his research contributions were deployed in Linux and KVM. His work was featured in the Communications of the ACM research highlights section. He received the USENIX FAST best paper award, the IBM Pat Goldberg memorial best paper award (twice), the HiPEAC paper award (twice), the Klein research prize, the Henri Gutwirth award for outstanding research, andresearch/faculty awards from Google, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, and VMware. Tsafrir earned his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, all in computing science (B.Sc. also in math). Before joining the Technion, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York, in the Advanced Operating Systems Group (K42) and the BlueGene System Software Group.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization
Authors: Edouard Bugnion, Jason Nieh, Dan Tsafrir
Series Title: Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01753-7
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Synthesis Collection of Technology (R0), eBColl Synthesis Collection 7
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-00625-8Published: 21 February 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-01753-7Published: 01 June 2022
Series ISSN: 1935-3235
Series E-ISSN: 1935-3243
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 188