Prototype of Light-weight Hypervisor for ARM Server Virtualization

As ARM CPUs become increasingly common in the server world, virtualization technologies for mobile systems need to be extended for ARM server systems. However, because this system has the limited resources compared to the traditional x86 server system, new virtualization technologies should be considered to allow as many virtual machines as possible to run efficiently and simultaneously on single ARM server system. In this paper, we present the prototype of lightweight hypervisor for ARM server system which can minimize the performance degradation of the guest operating system running on the hypervisor and provide full virtualization. We explore how to achieve the light-weight ARM hypervisor by describing and analyzing its detailed implementation. Through a performance comparison between the native operating system and the guest operating system running on the proposed hypervisor, we show that the proposed ARM hypervisor guarantees minimal virtualization overhead.