SMART-VMM: The Design And Implementation Of Virtual Machine Monitor Based On VT-x

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing and the improved performance of computer hardware, virtualization is gradually become one of the most popular computer technology.In recent years the major CPU manufacturers have proposed hardware-based virtualization technology to better support full virtualization, it is expected that the virtual machine monitors that based on hardware support will become mainstream.Currently the most popular VMM based on hardware virtualization support is KVM and Xen, which have a huge amount of code. As an alternative, we try to design a light-weight VMM named SMART-VMM from scratch which should be as small as possible. Compared to the huge code base of Linux+KVM or Xen, a light-weight VMM should provide a better multi-core scalability, better software isolation, and smaller computing trust base.The first phase of development work of SMART-VMM has completed, currently SMART-VMM can run some simple Guest OS such as UCOS. We did some performance tests on SMART-VMM and the result shows that the overhead of virtualization is relatively small(5% to 10%).This paper first reviews the various virtualization technologies and their advantages and disadvantages, then introduces hardware virtualization technology VT-x. Then we depict the design and implementation of the VMM through CPU virtualization, memory virtualization and I/O virtualization. After that, we do a series of performance tests on our VMM. Finally, we conclude this work and discuss some senior issues.