Computer

TERM PAPER ON VIRTUAL MACHINE

Osaigbovo Timothy

School of ICT,

Federal University of Technology Minna.

+2348034635653

timothyosaigbovo@yahoo.com

MTECH/SNAS/2012/3955

Submitted to

PROF. H. C. INYIAMA

VIRTUAL MACHINES

Osaigbovo Timothy

School of ICT,

Federal University of Technology Minna.

+2348034635653

timothyosaigbovo@yahoo.com

Abstract

Virtual machines provide an abstraction of the underlying physical system to the guest operating system running on it. Based on which level of abstraction the VMM provides and whether the guest and host system use the same ISA, we can classify virtual machines into many different types. For system virtual machines, there are two major development approaches, full system virtualization and para- virtualization. Because virtual machines can provide desirable features like software flexibility, better protection and hardware independence, they are applied in various research areas and have great

potential.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

B.3.2 [Design Styles: Virtual Machine

General Terms

New Machine Level, Architecture, Portability.

Keywords

Virtualization

1. Introduction

Standard computer systems are hierarchically constructed from three components: bare hardware, operating system, and application software. To get better software capability, a standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) was proposed to precisely define the interface between hardware and software. In other words, the ISA is the part of the processor that is visible to the programmer or compiler writer. It includes both user and system instructions. User instructions are the set that is accessible to both the operating system and application programs; while the system instructions are special privileged instructions for managing and protecting shared hardware resources, e.g., the processor, memory and I/O system. Only by system calls can application programs access these resources.

The standard architecture has many...