The Research Hypervisor
A Multi-Platform, Multi-Purpose Research Hypervisor
rHype Team
IBM®
TJ Watson Research Center
$Id: rhype.sgml,v 1.2 2005/02/16 22:00:19 jimix Exp $
Copyright © 2005 IBM Corp.
1. Introduction
The Research Hypervisor (rHype) from IBM research has been developed over the last 3 years to validate virtualization features in new hardware architectures and to study fundamental research issues in virtualization. For example, the Research Hypervisor has been used:
* to validate features developed for new processors like the Cell.
* to study future architecture ideas and functions for the high performance computing community within the PERCS project for DARPA.
* to study security in the context of virtualization within the sHype project.
The Research Hypervisor was designed from the start to be multi-platform, and today supports both the Power and x86 architectures. On Power, it conforms to the interfaces used by Linux running on IBM's commercial POWER Hypervisor in the new POWER5-based servers, and hence runs unmodified Linux distributions. On Intel we support a modified Linux kernel and demonstrate the multi-platform characteristics of the POWER Hypervisor interfaces.
