In a virtual machine monitor such as VMware's ESXi Server, how are shadow page tables implemented?
Posted
by ali01
on Stack Overflow
See other posts from Stack Overflow
or by ali01
Published on 2010-04-19T20:19:24Z
Indexed on
2010/04/19
20:23 UTC
Read the original article
Hit count: 220
My understanding is that VMMs such as VMware's ESXi Server maintain shadow page tables to map virtual page addresses of guest operating systems directly to machine (hardware) addresses. I've been told that shadow page tables are then used directly by the processor's paging hardware to allow memory access in the VM to execute without translation overhead.
I would like to understand a bit more about how the shadow page table mechanism works in a VMM.
Is my high level understanding above correct?
What kind of data structures are used in the implementation of shadow page tables?
What is the flow of control from the guest operating system all the way to the hardware?
How are memory access translations made for a guest operating system before its shadow page table is populated?
How is page sharing supported?
Short of straight up reading the source code of an open source VMM, what resources can I look into to learn more about hardware virtualization?
© Stack Overflow or respective owner