Patent Application: US-9528398-A

Abstract:
the problem of extending modern operating systems to run efficiently on large - scale shared memory multiprocessors without a large implementation effort is solved by a unique type of virtual machine monitor . virtual machines are used to run multiple commodity operating systems on a scalable multiprocessor . to reduce the memory overheads associated with running multiple operating systems , virtual machines transparently share major data structures such as the operating system code and the file system buffer cache . we use the distributed system support of modem operating systems to export a partial single system image to the users . two techniques , copy - on - write disks and the use of a special network device , enable transparent resource sharing without requiring the cooperation of the operating systems . this solution addresses many of the challenges facing the system software for these machines . the overheads of the monitor are small and the approach provides scalability as well as the ability to deal with the non - uniform memory access time of these systems . the overall solution achieves most of the benefits of operating systems customized for scalable multiprocessors yet it can be achieved with a significantly smaller implementation effort .

Description:
to demonstrate the approach of the present invention , we discuss for illustrative purposes an embodiment of the invention that combines commodity operating systems , not originally designed for large - scale multiprocessors , to form a high performance system software base . this embodiment , called disco , will be described as implemented on the stanford flash shared memory multiprocessor ( kuskin , 1994 ), an experimental cache coherent non - uniform memory architecture ( cc - numa ) machine . the flash multiprocessor consists of a collection of nodes each containing a processor , main memory , and i / o devices . the nodes are connected together with a high - performance scalable interconnect . the machines use a directory to maintain cache coherency , providing to the software the view of a shared - memory multiprocessor with non - uniform memory access times . although written for the flash machine , the hardware model assumed by disco is also available on a number of commercial machines including the convex exemplar ( brewer , 1997 ), silicon graphics origin2000 ( laudon , 1997 ), sequent numaq ( lovett , 1996 ), and datageneral numaliine . accordingly , disco illustrates the fundamental principles of the invention which may be adapted by those skilled in the art to implement the invention on other similar machines . disco contains many features that reduce or eliminate the problems associated with traditional virtual machine monitors . specifically , it minimizes the overhead of virtual machines and enhances the resource sharing between virtual machines running on the same system . disco allows operating systems running on different virtual machines to be coupled using standard distributed systems protocols such as tcp / ip and nfs . it also allows for efficient sharing of memory and disk resources between virtual machines . the sharing support allows disco to maintain a global buffer cache which is transparently shared by all the virtual machines , even when the virtual machines communicate through standard distributed protocols . fig1 shows how the virtual machine monitor allows multiple copies of potentially different operating systems to coexist . in this figure , five virtual machines coexist on the multiprocessor . some virtual machines run commodity uniprocessor or multiprocessor operating systems , and others run specialized operating systems fine - tuned for specific workloads . the virtual machine monitor schedules the virtual resources ( processor and memory ) or the virtual machines on the physical resources of the scalable multiprocessor . our experiments with realistic workloads on a detailed simulator of the flash machine show that disco achieves its goals . with a few simple modifications to an existing commercial operating system , the basic overhead of virtualization ranges from 3 % to 16 % for all our uniprocessor workloads . we show that a system with eight virtual machines can run some workloads 40 % faster than on a commercial symmetric multiprocessor operating system by increasing the scalability of the system software , without substantially increasing the system &# 39 ; s memory footprint . finally , we show that page placement and dynamic page migration and replication allow disco to hide the numa - ness of the memory system , improving the execution time by up to 37 %. early experiments on a uniprocessor sgi machine confirm the simulation - based results . this section describes the design and implementation of disco . we first describe the key abstractions exported by disco . we then describe the implementation of these abstractions . finally , we discuss the operating system requirements to run on top of disco . disco runs multiple independent virtual machines simultaneously on the same hardware by virtualizing all the resources of the machine . each virtual machine can run a standard operating system that manages its virtualized resources independently of the rest of the system . to match the flash machine , the virtual cpus of disco provide the abstraction of a mips r10000 processor . disco correctly emulates all instructions , the memory management unit , and the trap architecture of the processor allowing unmodified applications and existing operating systems to run on the virtual machine . though required for the flash machine , the choice of the processor was unfortunate for disco since the r10000 does not support the complete virtualization of the kernel virtual address space . below we detail the os changes needed to allow kernel - mode code to run on disco . besides the emulation of the mips processor , disco extends the architecture to support efficient access to some processor functions . for example , frequent kernel operations such as enabling and disabling cpu interrupts and accessing privileged registers can be performed using load and store instructions on special addresses . this interface allows operating systems tuned for disco to reduce the overheads caused by trap emulation . disco provides an abstraction of main memory residing in a contiguous physical address space starting at address zero . this organization was selected to match the assumptions made by the operating system . since most commodity operating systems are not designed to effectively manage the nonuniform memory of the flash machine , disco uses dynamic page migration and replication to export a nearly uniform memory access time memory architecture to the software . this allows a non - numa aware operating system to run well on flash without the changes needed for numa memory management . each virtual machine is created with a specified set of i / o devices , such as disks , network interfaces , periodic interrupt timers , clock , and a console . as with processors and physical memory , most operating systems assume exclusive access to their i / o devices , requiring disco to virtualize each i / o device . disco must intercept all communication to and from i / o devices to translate or emulate the operation . because of their importance to the overall performance and efficiency of the virtual machine , disco exports special abstractions for the scsi disk and network devices . disco virtualizes disks by providing a set of virtual disks that any virtual machine can mount . virtual disks can be configured to support different sharing and persistency models . a virtual disk can either have modifications ( i . e . disk write requests ) stay private to the virtual machine or they can be visible to other virtual machines . in addition , these modifications can be made persistent so that they survive the shutdown of the virtual machine or non - persistent so that they disappear with each reboot . to support efficient communication between virtual machines , as well as other real machines , the monitor virtualizes access to the networking devices of the underlying system . each virtual machine is assigned a distinct link - level address on an internal virtual subnet handled by disco . besides the standard network interfaces such as ethernet and fddi , disco supports a special network interface that can handle large transfer sizes without fragmentation . for communication with the world outside the machine , disco acts as a gateway that uses the network interfaces of the machine to send and receive packets . like most operating systems that run on shared - memory multiprocessors , disco is implemented as a multi - threaded shared memory program . disco differs from existing systems in that careful attention has been given to numa memory placement , cache - aware data structures , and interprocessor communication patterns . for example , disco does not contain linked lists or other data structures with poor cache behavior . the small size of disco , about 13 , 000 lines of code , allows for a higher degree of tuning than is possible with million line operating systems . to improve numa locality , the small code segment of disco , currently 72kb , is replicated into all the memories of flash machine so that all instruction cache misses can be satisfied from the local node . machine - wide data structures are partitioned so that the parts that are accessed only or mostly by a single processor are in a memory local to that processor . for the data structures accessed by multiple processors , very few locks are used and wait - free synchronization ( herlihy , 1991 ) using the mips ll / sc instruction pair is heavily employed . disco communicates through shared - memory in most cases . it uses inter - processor interrupts for specific actions that change the state of a remote virtual processor , for example tlb shootdowns and posting of an interrupt to a given virtual cpu . overall , disco is structured more like a highly tuned and scalable splash application ( woo , 1995 ) than like a general - purpose operating system . like previous virtual machine monitors , disco emulates the execution of the virtual cpu by using direct execution on the real cpu . to schedule a virtual cpu , disco sets the real machines &# 39 ; registers to those of the virtual cpu and jumps to the current pc of the virtual cpu . by using direct execution , most operations run at the same speed as they would on the raw hardware . the challenge of using direct execution is the detection and fast emulation of those operations that cannot be safely exported to the virtual machine . these operations are primarily the execution of privileged instructions performed by the operating system such as tlb modification , and the direct access to physical memory and i / o devices . for each virtual cpu , disco keeps a data structure that acts much like a process table entry in a traditional operating system . this structure contains the saved registers and other state of a virtual cpu when it is not scheduled on a real cpu . to perform the emulation of privileged instructions , disco additionally maintains the privileged registers and tlb contents of the virtual cpu in this structure . disco contains a simple scheduler that allows the virtual processors to be time - shared across the physical processors of the machine . the scheduler cooperates with the memory management to support affinity scheduling that increases data locality . for virtual machines with multiple cpus , disco uses gang scheduling of the virtual cpus of the same virtual machine to ensure realistic execution interleaving for the software running on the virtual machines . disco assigns special semantics to the reduced power consumption mode of the mips processor . this mode is used by the operating system whenever the system is idle . disco will deschedule the virtual cpu until the mode is cleared or an interrupt is posted . on the mips processor , disco runs in kernel mode with full access to the machine &# 39 ; s hardware . when control is given to a virtual machine to run , disco puts the processor in supervisor mode if running the virtual machine &# 39 ; s operating system , and in user mode otherwise . supervisor mode allows the operating system to use a protected portion of the address space ( the supervisor segment ) but does not give access to privileged instructions or physical memory . applications and kernel code can however still be directly executed since disco emulates the operations that cannot be issued in supervisor mode . when a trap such as page fault , system call , or bus error occurs , the processor traps to the monitor that emulates the effect of the trap on the currently scheduled virtual processor . this is done by updating the privileged registers of the virtual processor and jumping to the virtual machine &# 39 ; s trap vector . disco maintains all the privileged registers in the vcpu structure . privileged instructions that change the state of privileged registers are emulated by the monitor . the monitor updates the privileged registers as dictated by the instruction . in order to emulate the privileged instructions that modify and query the state of the tlb , disco maintains a software tlb . this structure holds the untranslated tlb entrie s that the kernel has entered in the tlb . in order to make lookup in the software tlb fast , disco implements a direct mapped tlb for the random entries . hardware interrupts are handled directly by the vmm through its own device drivers . the vmm posts an interrupt to the virtual machine when the operation that it has requested completes . the mechanism that posts an interrupt to a vcpu of a vm must execute on the physical processor that currently runs that vcpu ( if any ) since it alters the state of the vcpu . the altered state includes the status and cause registers , as well as the exception program counter ( epc ). the pc is set to the start of the vm &# 39 ; s exception handler . disco provides an abstraction of main memory residing in a contiguous physical address space starting at address zero . this organization was selected to match the assumptions made by the operating systems we run on disco . it eliminates the need to change the operating system to support the discontinuous memory layout in the physical address space of the flash machine . since most commodity operating systems are not designed to effectively manage the nonuniform memory of the flash machine , disco uses dynamic page migration and replication to export a nearly uniform memory access time memory architecture to the software . this allows a non - numa aware operating system to run well on flash without the changes needed for numa memory management . to virtualize physical memory , disco adds a level of address translation and maintains physical - to - machine address mappings . virtual machines use physical addresses that have memory starting at address zero and continuing for the size of virtual machine &# 39 ; s memory . disco maps these physical addresses to the 40 bit machine addresses used by the memory system of the flash machine . disco performs this physical - to - machine translation using the software - reloaded translation - lookaside buffer ( tlb ) of the mips processor . ( a similar technique is applied on processors with a hardware - reloaded tmb such as the intel x86 . the virtual machine monitor manages the page table and prevents the virtual machine from directly inserting entries into it .) when an operating system attempts to insert a virtual - to - physical mapping into the tlb , disco emulates this operation by translating the physical address into the corresponding machine address and inserting this corrected tlb entry into the tlb . once the tlb entry has been established , memory references through this mapping are translated with no additional overhead by the process or . to quickly compute the corrected tlb entry , disco keeps a per virtual machine pmap data structure that contains one entry for each physical page of a virtual machine . each pmap entry contains a pre - computed tlb entry that references the physical page location in real memory . disco merges that entry with the protection bits of the original entry before inserting it into the tlb . for example , a writeable mapping is only inserted in the tlb when the virtual machine requests it and the page is not marked copy - on - write . the pmap entry also contains backmaps pointing to the virtual addresses that are used to invalidate mappings from the tlb when a page is taken away from the virtual machine by the monitor . on mips processors , all user mode memory references must be translated by the tlb but kernel mode references used by operating systems may directly access physical memory and i / o devices through the unmapped segment of the kernel virtual address space . many operating systems place both the operating system code and data in this segment . unfortunately , the mips architecture bypasses the tlb for this direct access segment making it impossible for disco to efficiently remap these addresses using the tlb . having each operating system instruction trap into the monitor would lead to unacceptable performance . we were therefore required to re - link the operating system code and data to a mapped region of the address space . this problem seems unique to mips as other architectures such as alpha can remap these regions using the tlb . the ccnuma management and the virtual i / o devices need to transparently change the physical - to - machine mapping . the pmap handles this functionality . it first invalidates any tlb entries mapping the old machine page and then copies the page to a local machine page . supporting the unmapped regions in the tlb and flushing the tlb on virtual cpu switches results in an increase in the number of tlb misses for a given workload . in addition , each tlb miss is now more expensive because of the emulation of the trap architecture , the emulation of privileged instructions in the operating system &# 39 ; s tlb - miss handler , and the remapping of physical addresses described above . to lessen the performance impact , disco caches recent virtual - to - machine translations in a second - level software tlb . on each tlb miss , disco &# 39 ; s tlb miss handler first consults the second - level tlb . if it finds a matching virtual address it can simply place the cached mapping in the tlb , otherwise it forwards the tlb miss exception to the operating system running on the virtual machine . the effect of this optimization is that virtual machines appear to have much larger tlbs than the mips processors . the mips processors tag each tlb entry with an address space identifier ( asid ) to avoid having to flush the tlb on mmu context switches . to avoid the complexity of virtualizing the asids , disco flushes the machine &# 39 ; s tlb when scheduling a different virtual cpu on a physical processor . this approach speeds up the translation of the tlb entry since the asid field provided by the virtual machine can be used directly . besides providing fast translation of the virtual machine &# 39 ; s physical addresses to real machine pages , the memory management part of disco must also deal with the allocation of real memory to virtual machines . this is a particularly important task on ccnuma machines since the commodity operating system is depending on disco to deal with the non - uniform memory access times . disco must try to allocate memory and schedule virtual cpus so that cache misses generated by a virtual cpu will be satisfied from local memory rather than having to suffer the additional latency of a remote cache miss . to accomplish this , disco implements a dynamic page migration and page replication system ( bolosky , 1989 ; cox , 1989 ) that moves or replicates pages to maintain locality between a virtual cpu &# 39 ; s cache misses and the memory pages to which the cache misses occur . disco targets machines that maintain cache - coherence in hardware . on these machines , numa memory management is strictly an optimization that enhances data locality and is not required for correct execution . disco uses a robust policy that moves only pages that will likely result in an eventual performance benefit ( verghese , 1996 ). pages that are heavily accessed by only one node are migrated to that node . pages that are primarily read - shared are replicated to the nodes most heavily accessing them . pages that are write - shared are not moved because remote accesses cannot be eliminated for all processors . disco &# 39 ; s policy also limits the number of times a page can move to avoid excessive overheads . disco &# 39 ; s page migration and replication policy is driven by the cache miss counting facility provided by the flash hardware . flash counts cache misses to each page from every physical processor . once flash detects a hot page , the monitor chooses between migrating and replicating the hot page based on the cache miss counters . to migrate a page , the monitor transparently changes the physical - to - machine mapping . it first invalidates all tlb entries mapping the old machine page and then copies the data to a local machine page . to replicate a page , the monitor must first downgrade all tlb entries mapping the machine page to ensure read - only accesses . it then copies the page to the local node and updates the relevant tlb entries mapping the old machine page . the resulting configuration after replication is shown in fig2 . in this example , two different virtual processors of the same virtual machine logically read - share the same physical page , but each virtual processor accesses a local copy . disco maintains a memmap data structure that contains an entry for each real machine memory page . to perform the necessary tlb shootdowns during a page migration or replication , the memmap entry contains a list of the virtual machines using the page and the virtual addresses used to access them . a memmap entry also contains pointers to any replicated copies of the page . fig3 summarizes the key data structures of disco &# 39 ; s memory management and their interactions as described above . we discuss two examples of operations on these data structures . the first example describes the impact of a tlb miss . if the virtual address is not in the hardware tlb of the mips r10000 , disco &# 39 ; s tlb miss handler will first check if the tlb entry is present in the 12tlb ( second - level tlb ) of the vcpu ( virtual processor ). if this is not the case , disco will forward the exception to the virtual machine . the operating system &# 39 ; s tlb miss handler will contain a tlb write instruction that is emulated by disco . disco uses the physical address specified by the operating system to index into the pmap to determine the corresponding machine address , allocating one if necessary . the memmap is used to determine which replica is closest to the physical processor that currently schedules the vcpu . finally , the virtual - to - machine translation is inserted into the 12tlb and the r10000 tlb . the second example shows the impact of a page migration action . the hardware of the flash machine determines that a given machine page is &# 34 ; hot &# 34 ; and disco determines that it is suitable for migration . the transparent migration requires that all mappings that point to that page be removed from all processors . the entry in the memmap of that machine address contains the list of the pmap entries that refer to the page . the pmap entry contains a backmap to the virtual address and a bitmask of vcpus that possibly have the mapping to that machine address . finally , all matching entries in the relevant 12tlbs and r10000 tlbs are invalidated before the page is actually migrated . to virtualize access to i / o devices , disco intercepts all device accesses from the virtual machine and forwards them to the physical devices . although it would be possible for disco to interpose on the programmed input / output ( pios ) from the operating system device drivers and emulate the functionality of the hardware device , this approach would be complex , specific to each device , and require many traps . we found it was much cleaner to simply add special device drivers into the operating system . each disco device defines a monitor call used by the device driver to pass all command arguments in a single trap . devices such as disks and network interfaces include a dma map as part of their arguments . a dma map consists of a list of physical address - length pairs that specify the memory source or destination of the i / o operation . disco must intercept such dma requests to translate the physical addresses specified by the operating systems into machine addresses . disco &# 39 ; s device drivers then interact directly with the physical device . for devices accessed by a single virtual machine , disco only needs to guarantee the exclusivity of this access and translate the physical memory addresses of the dma , but does not need to virtualize the i / o resource itself . the interposition on all dma requests offers an opportunity for disco to share disk and memory resources among virtual machines . disco &# 39 ; s copy - on - write disks allow virtual machines to share both main memory and disk storage resources . disco &# 39 ; s virtual network devices allow virtual machines to communicate efficiently . the combination of these two mechanisms , detailed below , allows disco to support a system - wide cache of disk blocks in memory that can be transparently shared bet ween all the virtual machines . disco intercepts every disk request that dmas data into memory . when a virtual machine requests to read a disk block that is already in main memory , disco can process the request without going to disk . furthermore , if the disk request is a multiple of the machine &# 39 ; s page size , disco can process the dma request by simply mapping the page into the virtual machine &# 39 ; s physical memory . in order to preserve the semantics of a dma operation , disco maps the page read - only into the destination address page of the dma . attempts to modify a shared page will result in a copy - on - write fault handled internally by the monitor . using this mechanism , multiple virtual machines accessing a shared disk end up sharing machine memory , the copy - on - write semantics means that the virtual machine is unaware of the sharing with the exception that disk requests can finish nearly instantly . consider an environment running multiple virtual machin es for scalability purposes . all the virtual machines can share the same root disk containing the kernel and application programs . the code and other read - only data stored on the disk will be dma - ed into memory by the first virtual machine that accesses it . subsequent requests will simply map the page specified to the dma engine with out transferring any data . the result is shown in fig4 where all virtual machines share these read - only pages . effectively we get the memory sharing patterns expected of a single shared memory multiprocessor operating system even though the system runs multiple independent operating systems . to preserve the isolation of the virtual machines , disk writes must be kept private to the virtual machine that issues them . disco logs the modified sectors so that the copy - on - write disk is never actually modified . for persistent disks , these modified sectors would be logged in a separate disk partition managed by disco . to simplify our implementation , we only applied the concept of copy - on - write disks to non - persistent disks and kept the modified sectors in main memory whenever possible . the implementation of this memory and disk sharing feature of disco uses two data structures . for each disk device , disco maintains a b - tree indexed by the range of disk sectors being requested . this b - tree is used to find the machine memory address of the sectors in the global disk cache . a second b - tree is kept for each disk and virtual machine to find any modifications to the block made by that virtual machine . we used b - trees to efficiently support queries on ranges of sectors ( cormen , 1990 ). the copy - on - write mechanism is used for file systems such as the root disk whose modifications as not intended to be persistent or shared across virtual machines . for persistent disks such as the one containing user files , disco enforces that only a single virtual machine can mount the disk at any given time . as a result , disco does not need to virtualize the layout of the disk . persistent disks can be accessed by other virtual machines through a distributed file system protocol such as nfs . the copy - on - write mechanism for disks allows the sharing of memory resources across virtual machines , but does not allow virtual machines to communicate with each other . to communicate , virtual machines use standard distributed protocols . for example , virtual machines share files through nfs . as a result , shared data will end up in both the client &# 39 ; s and server &# 39 ; s buffer cache . without special attention , the data will be duplicated in machine memory . we designed a virtual subnet managed by disco that allows virtual machines to communicate with each other , while avoiding replicated data whenever possible . the virtual subnet and networking interfaces of disco also use copy - on - write mappings to reduce copying and to allow for memory sharing . the virtual device uses ethernet - like addresses and does not limit the maximum transfer unit ( mtu ) of packets . a message transfer sent between virtual machines causes the dma unit to map the page read - only into both the sending and receiving virtual machine &# 39 ; s physical address spaces . the virtual network interface accepts messages that consist of scattered buffer fragments . our implementation of the virtual network in disco and in the operating system &# 39 ; s device driver always respects the data alignment of the outgoing message so that properly aligned message fragments that span a complete page are always remapped rather than copied . using this mechanism , a page of data read from disk into the file cache of a file server running in one virtual machine can be shared with client programs that request the file using standard distributed file system protocols such as nfs . fig5 illustrates the case when the nfs reply to read request includes a data page . in ( 1 ) the monitor &# 39 ; s networking device remaps the data page from the source &# 39 ; s machine address space to the destination &# 39 ; s . in ( 2 ) the monitor remaps the data page from the driver &# 39 ; s mbuf to the clients buffer cache . this remap is initiated by the operating system through a monitor call . as a result , disco supports a global disk cache even when a distributed file system is used to connect the virtual machines . in practice , the combination of copy - on - write disks and the access to persistent data through the specialized network device provides a global buffer cache that is transparently shared by independent virtual machines . as a result , all read - only pages can be shared between virtual machines . although this reduces the memory footprint , this may adversely affect data locality as most sharers will access the page remotely . however , disco &# 39 ; s page replication policy selectively replicates the few &# 34 ; hot &# 34 ; pages that suffer the most cache misses . pages are therefore shared whenever possible and replicated only when necessary to improve performance . the &# 34 ; commodity &# 34 ; operating system we run on disco is irix , a unix svr4 based operating system from silicon graphics . disco is however independent of any specific operating system and we plan to support others such as windows nt and linux . in their support for portability , modern operating systems present a hardware abstraction level ( hal ) that allows the operating system to be effectively &# 34 ; ported &# 34 ; to run on new platforms . typically the hal of modern operating systems changes with each new version of a machine while the rest of the system can remain unchanged . our experience has been that relatively small changes to the hal can reduce the overhead of virtualization and improve resource usage . most of the changes made in irix were part of the hal . ( unlike other operating systems , irix does not contain a documented hal interface . in this paper , the hal includes all the platform and processor - specific procedures of the operating system .) all of the changes were simple enough that they are unlikely to introduce a bug in the software and did not require a detailed understanding of the internals of irix . although we performed these changes at the source level as a matter of convenience , many of them were simple enough to be performed using binary translation or augmentation techniques . virtual processors running in supervisor mode cannot efficiently access the kseg0 segment of the mips virtual address space , that always bypasses the tlb . unfortunately , many mips operating systems including irix 5 . 3 place the kernel code and data in the ksego segment . as a result , we needed to relocate the unmapped segment of the virtual machines into a portion of the mapped supervisor segment of the mips processor . this allow ed disco to emulate the direct memory access efficiently using the tlb . the need for relocating the kernel appears to be unique to mips and is not present in other modem architecture such as alpha , x86 , sparc , and powerpc . making these changes to irix required changing two header files that describe the virtual address space layout , changing the linking options , as well as 15 assembly statements in locore . s . unfortunately , this meant that we needed to re - compile and re - link the irix kernel to run on disco . disco &# 39 ; s monitor call interface reduces the complexity and overhead of accessing i / o devices . we implemented uart , scsi disks , and ethernet drivers that match this interface . since the monitor call interface provides the view of an idealized device , the implementation of these drivers was straightforward . since kernels are normally designed to run with different device drivers , this kind of change can be made without the source and with only a small risk of introducing a bug . the complexity of the interaction with the specific devices is left to the virtual machine monitor . fortunately , we designed the virtual machine monitor &# 39 ; s internal device driver interface to simplify the integration of existing drivers written for commodity operating systems . disco uses irix &# 39 ; s original device drivers . having to take a trap on every privileged register access can cause significant overheads when running kernel code such as synchronization routines and trap handlers that frequently access privileged registers . to reduce this overhead , we patched the hal of irix to convert these frequently used privileged instructions to use non - trapping load and store instructions to a special page of the address space that contains these registers . this optimization is only applied to instructions that read and write privileged registers without causing other side - effects . although for this experiment we performed the patches by hand to only a few critical locations , the patches could easily be automatically applied when the privileged instruction first generates a trap . as part of the emulation process , disco could overwrite certain instructions with the special load and store so it would not suffer the overhead of the trap again . to help the monitor make better resource management decisions , we have added code to the hal to pass hints to the monitor giving it higher - level knowledge of resource utilization . we inserted a small number of monitor calls in the physical memory management module of the operating systems . the first monitor call requests a zeroed page . since the monitor must clear pages to ensure the isolation of virtual machines anyway , the operating system is freed from this task . a second monitor call informs disco that a page has been put on the operating system &# 39 ; s free page list without a chance of reclamation , so that disco can immediately reclaim the memory . to improve the utilization of processor resources , disco assigns special semantics to the reduced power consumption mode of the mips processor . this mode is used by the operating system whenever the system is idle . disco will deschedule the virtual cpu until the mode is cleared or an interrupt is posted . a monitor call inserted in the hal &# 39 ; s idle loop would have had the same effect . for some optimizations disco relies on the cooperation of the operating system . for example , the virtual network device can only take advantage of the remapping techniques if the packets contain properly aligned , complete pages that are not written . we found that the operating systems networking subsystem naturally meets most of the requirements . for example , it preserves the alignment of data pages , taking advantage of the scatter / gather options of networking devices . unfortunately , irix &# 39 ; s mbuf management is such that the data pages of recently freed mbufs are linked together using the first word of the page . this guarantees that every packet transferred by the monitor &# 39 ; s networking device using remaps will automatically trigger at least one copy - on - write fault on the receiving end . a simple change to the mbuf freelist data structure fixed this problem . the kernel implementation of nfs always copies data from the incoming mbufs to the receiving file buffer cache , even when the packet contained un - fragmented , properly aligned pages . this would have effectively prevented the sharing of the file buffer cache across virtual machines . to have clients and servers transparently share the page , we specialized the call to bcopy to a new remap function offered by the hal . this remap function has the semantics of a bcopy routine but uses a monitor call to remap the page whenever possible . fig5 shows how a data page transferred during an nfs read or write call is first remapped from the source virtual machine to the destination memory buffer ( mbuf ) page by the monitor &# 39 ; s networking device , and then remapped into its final location by a call to the hal &# 39 ; s remap function . the ability to run a thin or specialized operating system allows disco to support large - scale parallel applications that span the entire machine . these applications may not be well served by a full function operating system . in fact , specialized operating systems such as puma ( shuler , 1995 ) are commonly used to run scientific applications on parallel systems . to illustrate this point , we developed a specialized library operating system ( kaashoek , 1997 ), &# 34 ; splashos &# 34 ;, that runs directly on top of disco . splashos contains the services needed to run splash - 2 applications ( woo , 1995 ): thread creation and synchronization routines , &# 34 ; libc &# 34 ; routines , and an nfs client stack for file i / o . the application is linked with the library operating system and runs in the same address space as the operating system . as a result , splashos does not need to support a virtual memory subsystem , deferring all page faulting responsibilities directly to disco . although one might find splashos to be an overly simplistic and limited operating system if it were to run directly on hardware , the ability to run it in a virtual machine alongside commodity operating systems offers a powerful and attractive combination . in conclusion , it should be emphasized that many specifics in the above detailed description many be varied without departing from the scope of the invention . such variations will be obvious to those skilled in the art in view of the invention as described . for example , the implementation described for illustrary purposes with this invention contains elements that are specific to the virtualization of the mips processor . the invention may however be easily incorporated in a virtual machine monitor written for another instruction set architecture by someone trained in the art . accetta et al . 1986 . mach : a new kernel foundation for unix development . in proceedings of the summer1986 usenix technical conference and exhibition . usenix assoc ., berkeley , calif . bolosky et al . 1989 . simple but effective techniques for numa memory management . in proceedings of the 12th acm symposium on operating system principles . acm , new york , 19 - 31 . bressoud et al . 1996 . hypervisor - based fault tolerance . acm transactions on computer systems14 , 1 , 80 - 107 . brewer et al . 1997 . the evolution of the hp / convex exemplar . in proceedings of compcon spring &# 39 ; 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