Solo: A Lightweight Virtual Machine

Abstract

The overhead caused by virtualization makes it difficult to apply VM in the applications which require high degrees of both performance isolation and efficiency, such as the high performance computing. In this paper, we present a lightweight virtual machine, named Solo. It simplifies the design of VMM greatly by making most privileged instructions bypass the VMM, except the I/O operations. Solo allows VM running directly on hardware with the highest privileges, therefore greatly reduces the overhead caused by virtualization. Our evaluation shows that Solo not only guarantees the VM performance isolation, but also improves VM performance to the level of traditional OS, and thus meets the requirements of the high performance applications without special hardware support.