US 7,689,987 B2Granted

Systems and methods for stack-jumping between a virtual machine and a host environment

AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation

InventorMike Neil

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Abstract

Several embodiments of the present invention provide a means for reducing overhead and, thus, improving operating efficiency in virtualized computing systems. Certain of these embodiments are specifically directed to providing a bypass mechanism for jumping directly from a first stack in the guest operating system to a second stack in the host operating system for a virtual machine environment. More specifically, certain embodiments of the present invention are directed to a system for and method of eliminating redundancy in execution of certain virtual machine commands and executing host environment equivalents by using bypass mechanisms, thereby bypassing redundant software layers within the guest and host stacks. For some of these embodiments, the bypass mechanism operates at a high-level component of the stack or, alternatively, the bypass mechanism operates at a low-level component of the stack.

Claims12

Dependent claims

A method, comprising:

executing a virtual machine, the virtual machine including a bimodal device, the bimodal device including a high-performance mode of operation and an emulation mode of operation, the emulation mode of operation configured to emulate a network card, the virtual machine executing a guest operating system, the guest operating system including a guest operating system network protocol stack for the bimodal device, the guest operating system network protocol stack including at least an application program interface and a device driver for the bimodal device;
receiving, by the guest operating system network protocol stack, a guest application program interface construct indicative of a request to send information via the bimodal device;
intercepting, while in the high-performance mode, the guest application program interface construct at the application program interface of the guest operating system network protocol stack;
translating the intercepted guest application program interface construct into a corresponding host application program interface construct for a host operating system network protocol stack, the network protocol stack configured to generate commands for a physical network card;
generating, by the host operating system network protocol stack, a request to send the information via the physical network card from the host application program interface construct;
and
sending, by the physical network card, the information.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.