Virtual machine system

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Details

G06F 900, G06F 946

Patent

active

044007698

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to a virtual machine system and, more particularly, relates to a virtual machine system provided with management programs which are used for running a plurality of operating systems parallelly at the same time.
In recent years, the concepts of virtual storage and virtual machines have been of increasing interest in the computing community. The virtual storage system may be defined generally as any information storage system in which there is, or may be, a distinction between the logical address generated by a program and the physical address for some real storage device from which information is actually fetched. Similarly, the virtual machine system may be defined as a computing system in which the instructions issued by a program may be different from those actually executed by the hardware to perform a given task. The above concepts of the virtual storage and virtual machines are very important when creating a large capacity computing system. In the present invention, the virtual machine is specifically referred to, rather than the virtual storage.
As will be explained hereinafter in detail, the virtual machine has an advantage in that, as compared to a conventional native machine, a plurality of programs, each of which runs in one of a corresponding plurality of operating systems, can be executed parallelly at the same time and also the organization of the computing system can be flexibly modified. However, the virtual machine has a disadvantage in that, as compared to the conventional native machine, the virtual machine often operates with a reduction of capacity due to the occurrence of so-called overhead.


SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a virtual machine system which can operate with no reduction of capacity, despite the overhead in the virtual machine system. Many kinds of overhead may be induced in the virtual machine system; however, the virtual machine system of the present invention is especially useful for suppressing a particular kind of overhead, one which is induced during simulation of an operation conducted by a privileged instruction.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWING

FIG. 1 illustrates the organization of a conventional native computing system;
FIG. 2 illustrates the organization of a conventional virtual machine system to which the present invention specifically refers;
FIG. 3 illustrates blocks used for explaining both the presence of address spaces and the addressing processes in the conventional virtual storage;
FIG. 4 depicts a flowchart used for explaining the operation of the VMM incorporated in the conventional virtual machine system;
FIG. 5 illustrates block diagrams of hardware which are employed in a virtual machine system, according to the present invention; and
FIG. 6 depicts a conventional organization of a main storage area which is suitable for operating the hardware of FIG. 5.


DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT

The concept of a "virtual machine" arose in the latter half of the year 1960 and many attempts have been made to put the concept of "a virtual machine" into practice. The merits of the "virtual machine" may be classified into two categories mentioned in the following paragraphs (A) and (B).
(A) A system can be realized by using a single computer, in which circumstance each of a plurality of users, which commonly utilize the single computing system, can utilize it as if each user exclusively occupies the single computing system.
(B) It is possible to create an imaginary computing system having an architecture which is slightly different from that of the real computing system and it is also possible to create an imaginary computing system which has an organization which is slightly different from that of the real computing system.
Thus, as previously mentioned, the virtual machine has the advantage that, as compared to a conventional native machine, it can accommodate a plurality of programs each of which runs in one of a corresponding plurali

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Robert B. Goldberg, Survey of Virtual Machine Research, Honeywell Information Systems & Harvard Press, pp. 34-45.
J. P. Buzen & U. O. Gagliardi, The Evolution of the Virtual Machine, National Computer Conference, 1973, pp. 291-299.

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