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% Registration Xen 3.0 and the Art of Virtualization
% [2]Register/Submit Ian Pratt (ian.pratt@cl.cam.ac.uk)
The Xen Virtual Machine Monitor will soon be undergoing
its third major release, and is maturing into a stable,
secure, and full-featured virtualization solution for
Linux and other operating systems.
This new release of Xen supports a number of key new
features, such as: SMP guest operating systems (as well
as SMP hosts); x86\_64 support (with further ports to
ppc and {ia-64} in progress); and support for Intel's
VT-x virtualization extensions, which enable Xen/Linux
to host `legacy' OSes such as Windows XP.
This paper reviews the Xen hypervisor ABI, and examines
the Linux 2.6 port. We follow the evolution of memory
virtualization techniques supported by Xen and show how
the current implementation achieves excellent
performance while minimising changes to Linux. We
discuss the new support for SMP guest OSes, and show
how modifications to Linux`s spinlock code allow us to
optimise scheduling of virtual CPUs. Finally we look at
how Linux IO devices may be virtualized and exported to
other virtual machines using high-performance
`device-channels.'
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