Teaching Virtualization by Building a Hypervisor

Abstract

Virtual machines (VMs) are an increasingly ubiquitous feature of modern computing, yet the interested student or professional has limited resources to learn how VMs work. In particular, there is a lack of "hands-on" exercises in constructing a virtual machine monitor (VMM, or hypervisor), which are both simple enough to understand completely but realistic enough to capture the practical challenges in using this technology. This paper describes a set of assignments to extend a small, pedagogical operating system (OS) to form a hypervisor and host itself. This pedagogical hypervisor, called HOSS, adds roughly 1,000 lines of code to the MIT JOS source, and includes a set of guided exercises. Initial results with HOSS in an upper-level virtualization course indicate that students enjoyed the assignments and were able to apply what they learned to solve different virtualizationrelated problems. HOSS is publicly available.

peRISCVcope: A Tiny Teaching-Oriented RISC-V Interpreter

“…On the contrary, Palicherla et al offer an excellent tool to learn how to build a hypervisor following a hands-on approach with several labs. They propose HOSS, a small OS that can virtualize itself [5]. HOSS is based on MIT's JOS teaching-oriented OS 2 and runs on x86 and AMD64 architectures.…”