Hypervisor - PCs and Desktop Systems

PCs and Desktop Systems

Interest in the high-profit server-hardware market sector has led to the development of hypervisors for machines using the Intel x86 instruction set, including for traditional desktop PCs. One of the early PC hypervisors, the commercial-software VMware, debuted in 1998.

The x86 architecture used in most PC systems poses particular difficulties to virtualization. Full virtualization (presenting the illusion of a complete set of standard hardware) on x86 has significant costs in hypervisor complexity and run-time performance. Starting in 2005, CPU vendors have added hardware virtualization assistance to their products, for example: Intel's Intel VT-x (codenamed Vanderpool) and AMD's AMD-V (codenamed Pacifica). These extensions address the parts of x86 that are difficult or inefficient to virtualize, providing additional support to the hypervisor. This enables simpler virtualization code and a higher performance for full virtualization.

An alternative approach requires modifying the guest operating-system to make system calls to the hypervisor, rather than executing machine I/O instructions that the hypervisor simulates. This is called paravirtualization in Xen, a "hypercall" in Parallels Workstation, and a "DIAGNOSE code" in IBM's VM. VMware supplements the slowest rough corners of virtualization with device drivers for the guest. All are really the same thing, a system call to the hypervisor below. Some microkernels such as Mach and L4 are flexible enough such that "paravirtualization" of guest operating systems is possible.

In June 2008, Microsoft delivered a new Type-1 hypervisor called Hyper-V (codenamed "Viridian" and previously referred to as "Windows Server virtualization"); the design features OS integration at the lowest level. Versions of the Windows operating system beginning with Windows Vista include extensions to boost performance when running on top of the Hyper-V hypervisor.