Design of ISA for efficient virtualization

Popek, Goldberg have done some research on the formal requirements for virtualizable third Generation Architectures. This paper discusses how to design Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) that supporting virtualization. Firstly, it defines formally the concepts that concerns with the issue. Secondly, it reclassifies the instructions according to instruction behaviors. Thirdly, it discusses how to reduce the proportion of instructions that are executed with intervention and interpretation of virtual machine monitor (VMM) in the entire instruction set so as to expand the efficiency space in further with the premise of the whole machine can be virtualized (MCV). At last, it not only gives but proves a theorem about the mapping between any instruction sequences when VMM doesn´t exist and its counterpart when VMM does exist. These not only provide guidelines for the design of ISA and the construction of efficient VMM, but also help to assess the existing ISA and make some necessary modification to enable MCV.