Implementation of a Purely Hardware-Assisted VMM for X86 Architecture

Virtualization is a technique for efficient utilization of hardware resources. Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) is a piece of software which facilitates hardware Virtualization. Software based Virtualization technologies encompass considerable instruction overhead. The authors have implemented a purely hardware-assisted VMM for x86 architecture on AMD Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) to overcome the instruction overhead caused by software based Virtualization. The performance impact due to Virtualization is measured in terms of the CPU time consumed by certain critical sections of Virtualization specific code. A quantitative performance analysis using the purely Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine Monitor reveals that Hardware Virtualization at its current stage suffers from performance overhead, but improves considerably with hardware enhancement.