System and method to deprivilege components of a virtual machine monitor

US7757231B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Intel Corporation · US

Inventors

• Andrew V. Anderson · Forest Grove, US
• Steven M. Bennett · Hillsboro, US
• Erik Cota-Robles · Portland, US
• Alain Kagi · Portland, US
• Gilbert Neiger · Portland, US
• Rajesh Madukkarumukumana · Portland, US
• Sebastian Schoenberg · Hillsboro, US
• Richard Uhlig · Hillsboro, US
• Michael A. Rothman · Puyallup, US
• Vincent J. Zimmer · Federal Way, US
• Stalinselvaraj Jeyasingh · Portland, US

Key dates

• Filing date: Dec 10, 2004
• Grant date: Jul 13, 2010
• Expiry date: Aug 19, 2028

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06F9/45533
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

In some embodiments, the invention involves a system to deprivilege components of a virtual machine monitor and enable deprivileged service virtual machines (SVMs) to handle selected trapped events. An embodiment of the invention is a hybrid VMM operating on a platform with hardware virtualization support. The hybrid VMM utilizes features from both hypervisor-based and host-based VMM architectures. In at least one embodiment, the functionality of a traditional VMM is partitioned into a small platform-dependent part called a micro-hypervisor (MH) and one or more platform-independent parts called service virtual machines (SVMs). The micro-hypervisor operates at a higher virtual machine (VM) privilege level than any SVM, while the SVM and other VMs may still have access to any instruction set architecture (ISA) privilege level. Other embodiments are described and claimed.