Research On Virtual Machine For Arm-based Device Based On Linux Kernel Virtual Machine

Since virtualization technology could ease the management of computer system and increase the portability, the reliability and the security of the system, it has become to be an important research area of computer technology and application. Embedded system is becoming to be an amateurish computing system. Then, the same to general compter system, embedded system should also face to the requirements, such as the system management, the reliability, the adaptability of the software, the security and so on. So it's significative for embedded system to invoke virtualization technology. Linux kernel virtual machine (KVM) is an open source virtualization technology. Since KVM works as a modle of Linux Kernel, it has strong adaptability and performance. KVM requires that processor architecture supports hardware virtualization. However, ARM architecture which is applied much abroad in embedded system market doesn't support hardware virtualization, and KVM can't run on the embedded system based on ARM architecture directnessly, and there is no related domestic research at present.The paper has researched and analysed the specialties and functions of ARM processor's sensitivity instructions, and given a research on the technology of system virtualization for the processor which doesn't support hardware virtualization. The paper gives a thorough research on lightweight paravirtualization based on KVM, and analyses its manners of disposing traps and hardware interrupts. Replacing sensiticity instruction with trap could ease the virtualization. Based on the above research, the paper gives a design of virtualization on ARM architecture using KVM, and actualizes the mechanisms of the virtual machine particularly, including of CPU virtualization, memory protection mechanism, the mechanism of shadow page table and shared page and the manner of mapping interrupt handlers to virtual memory and so on. The virtualization scheme given in the paper is a full virtualization technology which doesn't require that the guest operating system's kernel should be amended, and could meet the need that running virtual machines on ARM architecture using KVM monitor.