Using virtual machines in modern computing environments with limited architectural support
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Virtualization has gone through a full ``popularity cycle''. Originally conceived in the mainframe era, virtual machines provided an efficient, isolated, and compatible duplicate of the hardware of the underlying machine. Systems designed in that era provided specific architectural support for virtualization. Virtual machines quickly lost popularity with the increased sophistication of operating systems, and subsequent processor architectures were designed without consideration for virtualization. This dissertation proposes to use virtual machines to address limitations of commodity operating systems on modern architectures, even in the absence of architectural support for virtualization in the hardware. The primary technical contributions of this dissertation were developed as part of two systems, each built for platforms with limited architectural support for virtualization. First, Disco ran commodity operating systems on scalable MIPS multiprocessors. Disco enabled virtual machines to form a virtual cluster that could transparently share the resources of the underlying multiprocessor. Second, VMware Workstation is a successful commercial product that allows multiple, unmodified operating systems to run concurrently on the same x86 system, allowing users to decouple their guest operating systems from the underlying hardware. VMware Workstation was the first 32-bit virtual machine monitor for the x86 architecture, and demonstrated that the x86 architecture was indeed virtualizable, despite a lack of architectural support. Today, and in part because of the impact of Disco and VMware, virtual machines once again play a foundational role in Information Technology, and current-generation hardware provides architectural support for virtualization, similar to what already existed decades ago on mainframes.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Bugnion, Edouard |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Computer Science Department |
| Primary advisor | Rosenblum, Mendel |
| Thesis advisor | Rosenblum, Mendel |
| Thesis advisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Ousterhout, John K |
| Advisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
| Advisor | Ousterhout, John K |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Edouard Bugnion. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Edouard Bugnion
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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