Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization by Edouard Bugnion

Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization by Edouard Bugnion

This book focuses on the core question of the necessary architectural support provided by hardware to efficiently run virtual machines, and of the corresponding design of the hypervisors that run them. Virtualization is still possible when the instruction set architecture lacks such support, but the hypervisor remains more complex and must rely on additional techniques.

Despite the focus on architectural support in current architectures, some historical perspective is necessary to appropriately frame the problem. The first half of the book provides the historical perspective of the theoretical framework developed four decades ago by Popek and Goldberg. It also describes earlier systems that enabled virtualization despite the lack of architectural support in hardware.

As is often the case, theory defines a necessary-but not sufficient-set of features, and modern architectures are the result of the combination of the theoretical framework with insights derived from practical systems. The second half of the book describes state-of-the-art support for virtualization in both x86-64 and ARM processors. This book includes an in-depth description of the CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization of these two processor architectures, as well as case studies on the Linux/KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisors. It concludes with a performance comparison of virtualization on current-generation x86- and ARM-based systems across multiple hypervisors.

Edouard Bugnion is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. His areas of interest include operating systems, datacenter infrastructure (systems and networking), and computer architecture.

Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the U.S., where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco). At VMware from 1998-2005, he played many roles including CTO. At Nuova/Cisco from 2005-2011, he helped build the core engineering team and became the VP/CTO of Cisco's Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group, a group that brought to market the Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for virtualized datacenters.

Together with his colleagues, Bugnion received the ACM Software System Award for VMware 1.0 in 2009. His paper on Disco received a Best Paper Award at SOSP '97 and was entered into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award. At EPFL, he received the OSDI 2014 Best Paper Award for his work on the IX dataplane operating system. Bugnion has a Dipl.Eng. degree from ETH Zurich, an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in computer science.