Luvalley-Lite: An Effort to Balance Re-use and Re-coding

When constructing a virtual machine monitor (VMM), there are two different trends. The first one is trying to make the VMM be self-inclusive, while the second one is to make the VMM part of the host operating system. The former is prefered by independent virtualization provider (IVP) or BIOS manufacturer, and the later is advocated by OS vendors. In this article, after analyzing the implementation of three prevail VMMs, it is argued that: 1) unless the VMM is used as part of the BIOS, being self-inclusive is not a wise decision; 2) overly utilizing the existing functions that the underlying host operating system provides can not produce good solution to the problem of computer system virtualization. The design philosophy, architecture and implementation of Luvalley-lite is introduced to show our efforts to make a balance between reusing commodity OS functions and fitting the virtualization environment well. The approach of avoiding being restricted by the GPL license is also described. Due to the lack of publicly acknowledged performance benchmark, only preliminary experiments are conducted.