Memory addressing for a virtual machine implementation on a computer processor supporting virtual hash-page-table searching

Abstract

A software monitor, interposed between the hardware layer of a computer system and one or more guest operating systems, constructs and maintains a guest-physical-address-to-host-physical-address map for each guest operating system, and maintains a virtual memory addressing context for each guest operating system that may include a virtual-hash-page table for each guest operating system, the contents of translation registers for each guest operating system, CPU-specific virtual-memory translations for each guest operating system, and the contents of various status registers. The monitor runs at the highest privilege level provided by the hardware system, intercepting attempts to execute privileged instructions by guest operating systems, and simulates or enhances certain of the privileged instructions related to virtual-memory addressing in order to construct and maintain the guest-physical-address-to-host-physical-address map and to provide each guest operating system with the illusion that the guest operating system is executing as the most privileged process on a virtual machine.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.