The Grand Daddy of Them All
For those of you that think that Virtualization is a hot new technology, here is a reminder that it actually pre-dates the 8086! VirtualBox Documents
I am sorry to say that the VBox team produce some excellent software, but when it comes to selling its strengths they are strangely modest:
- VirtualBox downloads page -- see link for User Manual (unfortunately this URL changes every release hence the indirection.)
And of course you can get lost in Wikipedia for an hour or so chaising around its articles. Some are quite good, but they do tend to suffer being over-tweaked by too many authors.
- Virtualization and following links
AnandTech is a niche online magazine / site but old Shanti publishes some excellent technology papers including these intros to virtualisation technology.
- Application Virtualization
- Hardware / Hypervisor Based Virtualization
- Container Based Virtualization
- Independent Nested Paging Virtualization Tests
- Technologov's Introduction to Virtualization Theory
- Stefan Becker's VirtualBox How To (in German)
These are the papers from my alma mater on its initial development of Xen and which explain well the whole concept of paravirtualization which this Cambridge research team really pioneered. VMware Papers
As well as all of their polished product material, VMware to their credit also publish some excellent papers on how their product works. Since the VBox development is completely separately some of the approaches here are different to VBox, but there is also a lot of 'convergent evolution'.
- A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization
- Virtualizing I/O devices on VMWare Workstation's Hosted VMM
- A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors
- VMware Virtual Networking Concepts
- Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
- Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems
- The Open Virtual Machine Format
The MS papers tend to be high on marketing content and low on data but here is one that some hackers will find useful: Intel Papers
I have picked out the Initial Intel specification on their Hardware Virtualization interface. AMD Papers
AMD have now withdrawn their equivalent Pacifa specification and you can no longer find it on the Internet. However its content has now been merged into their x86-64bit Architectures Documents.
- AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 1: Application Programming
- AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 2: System Programming
- AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 3: General-Purpose and System Instructions
- AMD I/O Virtualization Technology (IOMMU) Specification
Terry