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Fast secure virtualization for the ARM platform

University of British Columbia

In recent years, powerful handheld computing devices such as personal digital assistants and mobile smart phones have become ubiquitous in home and office environments. Advancements in handheld device hardware have driven the development of the software that runs on them. As these devices become more powerful, increasingly connected, and the tasks performed by their operating systems more complex there is a need for virtual machine monitors. Virtual machine monitors such as the Xen hypervisor developed at the University of Cambridge could bring an increased level of security to handheld devices by using resource isolation to protect hosted operating systems. VMMs could also be used to place constraints on the resource utilization of hosted operating systems and their applications. Xen is closely tied to the x86 computer architecture and is optimized to work well on desktop personal computers. One of its design goals was to provide virtualization on x86 computers similar to that which was previously found only on IBM mainframes designed to support virtualization. We aim to provide this same style of virtualization on mobile devices, the majority of which are powered by the ARM computer architecture. The ARM architecture differs considerably from the x86 architecture. ARM was designed with high performance, small die size, low power consumption, and tight code density in mind. By migrating Xen to the ARM architecture, we are interested in gaining insight into the capacity of ARM powered devices to support virtual machines. Furthermore, we want to know which of the StrongARM’s architectural features help or hinder the support of a Xen-style paravirtualization interface and whether guest operating systems will be able to run without modification on top of a StrongARM based hypervisor. In this thesis, we describe the design and implementation issues encountered while porting the Xen hypervisor to the StrongARM architecture. The implementation of a prototype has been carried out for SA-110 StrongARM processor and is based on the hypervisor in Xen version 1.2.

Text

2010-01-08

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/17835

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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