February 19, 2025
Abstract:
Nowadays, virtualization is a ubiquitous concept present from edge to cloud computing.Its strength and appeal lie in its ability to offer enhanced resource abstraction management and isolation of the platform resources. However, not everything is shiny. The support required to enable virtualization and the added complexity introduces performance overheads. Moreover, the current rigid binary model of resource virtualization prevents dynamic control over what is virtualized at run-time. This paper outlines a novel approach to virtualization on commercial platforms, namely Softwareless Nano-Virtualization (SNV). This approach leverages the ability to steer cache coherence traffic using custom hardware, allowing to surgically and transparently control the mapping of resources to be virtualized. This presentation will provide SNV’s main operating principles, provide an early look at its potential and present preliminary results for a basic proof-of-concept SNV module implemented on commercial hardware.