CASL hypervisor and its virtualization platform

In this paper, we present an ARM-based hardwareassisted hypervisor, named CASL-Hypervisor, and a full system virtualization platform developed in SystemC which enables software/hardware co-simulation of virtual machine systems. CASL-Hypervisor takes advantage of an additional processor mode, extended memory management unit, configurable hardware traps and specialized hardware devices to virtualize unmodified Linux-based guest operating systems. By utilizing hardware extensions, development effort of CASL-Hypervisor can be greatly reduced and the hypervisor has achieved relatively low virtualization overhead. Evaluation is demonstrated on an approximately-timed manner so it is able to do fast software/hardware co-simulation and evaluations. We use the ARM-v7A instruction set simulator as the host processor. The hypervisor overhead can be quantified through instruction count ratio of guest operating system to the hypervisor. The results show that CASL-Hypervisor successfully virtualizes four guest operating systems with about 9.78% overhead.