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If the hardware access is taken care by the hypervisor, doesn't this imply the hypervisor supports the functionality of device drivers, i.e. the hypervisor has
by pacala 14y ago
If the hardware access is taken care by the hypervisor, doesn't this imply the hypervisor supports the functionality of device drivers, i.e. the hypervisor has become the OS? Granted, it may delegate the device driver work to a some VM, in which case we're dealing with a microkernel of sorts.
- pjmlp 14y agoIn a way yes, the hypervisor is the new OS, although a very thin one. Some kind of microkernel, yes. With the set of required features for hardware abstraction and virtualization, with everything else being provided by the respective language runtime. This is much faster than traditional operating system stacks, and may provide a way into bringing microkernels into mainstream OSs. When using programming languages that come with batteries included, meaning with a good set of libraries for all the usual OS services, then removing a few layers between hardware and application helps running everything faster and increases security due to a smaller set of code. The guys behind Microsoft's Singularity project are also researching something similar for Windows, a project named Drawbridge, where the full OS runs on a hypervisor as a set of libraries in user space. Anyway this is nothing new, the idea of a virtualized OS goes back to OS/360, it was just kept away in the mainframe world and is now becoming mainstream.