Patent ID: 6895491

Claim:
A method for efficiently translating virtual-memory addresses to physical-memory addresses in a computer system serving as a platform for execution of a number of guest operating systems, the method comprising: providing a monitor; partitioning a machine-architecture-supplied virtual-address space into separate virtual-address-space partitions for use by the guest operating systems and the monitor, each virtual-address-space partition used by one of a guest operating system or the monitor; running the monitor at a privilege level more privileged than any privilege level at which a guest operating system runs; and intercepting, by the monitor, attempts by the guest operating systems to execute virtual-memory related instructions in order to create and maintain a guest-physical-address-to-host-physical-address map for each guest operating system; and translate guest-virtual-memory addresses, within a virtual-address-space partition allocated by the monitor to the guest operating system, to host physical addresses.