Hardware Virtualization
Qian Xu, Rashmin Bharatbhai Patel · 2020
Hardware virtualization has greatly improved the system performance, which makes the cloud computing from concept to today&s;s hyper-scale cloud use. Memory virtualization is important as the guest has its own OS and memory management. Memory virtualization supports the implementation of the virtual address space by two-level address translation, namely guest virtual address-> guest physical address-> host physical address. Memory virtualization adds the two-level address translation; as a result, Intel VT-x adds an extended page table so that two-level address translation can be assisted by hardware. There are three models for I/O virtualization: I/O full virtualization, I/O paravirtualization, and I/O pass-through. Single root-I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) is a hardware virtualization specification developed by peripheral component interconnect (PCI)-SIG. The PCIe pass-through mechanism allows a network interface card to be passed to a VM directly. SR-IOV is widely used by the PCIe device, which can be partitioned, and it can support up to 256 virtual functions.