Safe Hardware Access with the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

Abstract

The Xen virtual machine monitor allows multiple operating systems to execute concurrently on commodity x86 hard-ware, providing a solution for server consolidation and util-ity computing. In our initial design, Xen itself contained device-driver code and provided safe shared virtual device access. In this paper we present our new Safe Hardware Interface, an isolation architecture used within the latest release of Xen which allows unmodied device drivers to be shared across isolated operating system instances, while protecting individual OSs, and the system as a whole, from driver failure. 1