| Operating system virtulization technology decouples the close relations between hardware and software by inserting the virtual machine monitor as the virtualization layer between the underneath computer architecture and the upper operating system.The technology improves the usage efficiency of the computing resources greately by implementing a transperant framework for scalable computing systems, and becomes the research focus of computer architecture once again.But most of the current commercial virtual machine monitors are deployed on homogenous computing platform, which limits the possibility of integrating the heterogenous computing resources.The paper presents a virtual machine monitor running on heterogenous platforms to achieve operating system level full virtulization through dynamic binary translation. The virtual machine monitor is named as vBtrans, which fully virualizes IA-32 architecture on Itanium platform and can run unmodified IA-32 Linux in its virtual environment. At first, we discuss the system design of vBtrans. In accordance with the portability, loosely coupled structure is adopted as the system architecture of vBtrans. Then we dig into the realization of virtual memory management mechanism,interrupt handling and I/O processing of IA-32 architecture on Itanium platform. We also present the system optimization methods adopted in vBtrans, which include the physical address indexed translation code cache management mechanism,the proactive interrupt handling strategy and MMIO's self-adapted translation.Finally, vBtrans's performance on integer computing,system call and network I/O are evaluated by running SPEC2000 INT,Unix Bench and scp correspondingly in its guest OS. Experimental data shows that the performance of SPEC2000 INT,Unix Bench and scp are about 60%,30% and 53% of the ones running on native platform seperately. The performance improvement is also achieved through employing the above optimization methods. |
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