Rethinking the design of virtual machine monitors

A virtual machine monitor is a software system that partitions a single physical machine into multiple virtual machines. Traditionally, VMMs have created a precise replica of the underlying physical machine. Through faithful emulation, VMMs support the execution of legacy guest operating systems such as Windows or Linux without modifications. However, traditional VMMs suffer from poor scalability and extensibility. To overcome the poor scalability and extensibility of traditional virtual machine monitors that partition a single physical machine into multiple virtual machines, the Denali VMM uses paravirtualization to promote scalability and hardware interposition to promote extensibility.