Hardware virtualization support for Afterburner/L4

Short Description
Full virtualization of the IA32 architecture can be achieved using hardware support. The L4 microkernel has been extended with mechanisms to leverage Intel’s VT-x technology. This work proposes a user level virtual machine monitor that complements L4’s virtualization extensions and realizes microkernel-based full virtualization of arbitrary operating systems. A prototype implementation within the Afterburner framework demonstrates the approach by successfully booting a current Linux kernel.

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Content
With the performance advancements of processors, virtualization has become applicable to personal computers and small servers. On recent processor generations the performance overhead due to virtualization is more than acceptable. This development led to widely-used applications like server consolidation, system isolation and migration.
A virtual machine monitor (VMM) can run on bare hardware, without a full operating system supporting it. Such a VMM, also called hypervisor, has full control over the hardware rather than going through abstractions provided by the operating system. Therefore, a hypervisor can optimize for performance and improve reliability. That is, the VMM cannot crash because of bugs e.g. in the Linux kernel, but only depends on a correct implementation of the VMM itself. In other words, the trusted code base is minimized to the VMM.
A hypervisor is much like an microkernel. It is a thin software layer on top of the hardware and provides a clean interface to the next software layer above. In the case of a hypervisor, the interface is a subset of the Instruction Set Architecture, rather than a set of system calls. Both provide abstractions and mechanisms for execution entities, isolation and communication. Based on the thesis that microkernels and hypervisors are similar enough to justify an integration of both, the L4 microkernel [7] was extended [4] to support hardware virtualization extensions like Intel VT-x [11].
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