Supporting multiple types of guests by a hypervisor
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorMichael K. Gschwind
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Abstract
A system configuration is provided that includes multiple partitions that have differing translation mechanisms associated therewith. For instance, one partition has associated therewith a single level translation mechanism for translating guest virtual addresses to host physical addresses, and another partition has a nested level translation mechanism for translating guest virtual addresses to host physical addresses. The different translation mechanisms and partitions are supported by a single hypervisor. Although the hypervisor is a paravirtualized hypervisor, it provides full virtualization for those partitions using nested level translations.
Claims10
A method of facilitating translation of memory addresses, said method comprising:
- providing, by a hypervisor executing within a computing environment, a first type of translation support for a first type of guest operating system supported by the hypervisor, the first type of translation support comprising a paravirtualization support in which the first type of guest operating system assists in handling address translation faults corresponding to host translations of guest memory addresses by at least updating, at least in part, an address translation data structure of the host;
- and
- providing, by the hypervisor, a second type of translation support for a second type of guest operating system supported by the hypervisor, the second type of translation support comprising a virtualization support in which address translation faults corresponding to host translations of guest memory addresses are handled by a component of the computing environment other than the second type of guest operating system, wherein the second type of guest operating system does not update the address translation data structure of the host.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.