Binary Translation with Full Virtualization

Binary Translation with Full Virtualization

Depending on implementation technologies, hardware virtualization can be classified into two categories: full virtualization and host-based virtualization. Full virtualization does not need to modify the host OS. It relies on binary translation to trap and to virtualize the execution of certain sensitive, nonvirtualizable instructions. The guest OSes and their applications consist of noncritical and critical instructions. In a host-based system, both a host OS and a guest OS are used. A virtuali-zation software layer is built between the host OS and guest OS. These two classes of VM architec-ture are introduced next.

1. Full Virtualization

With full virtualization, noncritical instructions run on the hardware directly while critical instructions are discovered and replaced with traps into the VMM to be emulated by software. Both the hypervisor and VMM approaches are considered full virtualization. Why are only critical instructions trapped into the VMM? This is because binary translation can incur a large performance overhead. Noncritical instructions do not control hardware or threaten the security of the system, but critical instructions do. Therefore, running noncritical instructions on hardware not only can promote efficiency, but also can ensure system security.

2. Binary Translation of Guest OS Requests Using a VMM

This approach was implemented by VMware and many other software companies. As shown in Figure 3.6, VMware puts the VMM at Ring 0 and the guest OS at Ring 1. The VMM scans the instruction stream and identifies the privileged, control- and behavior-sensitive instructions. When these instructions are identified, they are trapped into the VMM, which emulates the behavior of these instructions. The method used in this emulation is called binary translation. Therefore, full vir-tualization combines binary translation and direct execution. The guest OS is completely decoupled from the underlying hardware. Consequently, the guest OS is unaware that it is being virtualized.

The performance of full virtualization may not be ideal, because it involves binary translation which is rather time-consuming. In particular, the full virtualization of I/O-intensive applications is a really a big challenge. Binary translation employs a code cache to store translated hot instructions to improve performance, but it increases the cost of memory usage. At the time of this writing, the performance of full virtualization on the x86 architecture is typically 80 percent to 97 percent that of the host machine.

3. Host-Based Virtualization

An alternative VM architecture is to install a virtualization layer on top of the host OS. This host OS is still responsible for managing the hardware. The guest OSes are installed and run on top of the virtualization layer. Dedicated applications may run on the VMs. Certainly, some other applications

can also run with the host OS directly. This host-based architecture has some distinct advantages, as enumerated next. First, the user can install this VM architecture without modifying the host OS.  The virtualizing software can rely on the host OS to provide device drivers and other low-level services. This will simplify the VM design and ease its deployment.

Second, the host-based approach appeals to many host machine configurations. Compared to the hypervisor/VMM architecture, the performance of the host-based architecture may also be low. When an application requests hardware access, it involves four layers of mapping which downgrades performance significantly. When the ISA of a guest OS is different from the ISA of the underlying hardware, binary translation must be adopted. Although the host-based architecture has flexibility, the performance is too low to be useful in practice.