An Embedded Approach to Hypervisor-Oriented Interruption Virtualization Operation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for virtualizing interruptions in an embedded hypervisor environment. The method involves the hypervisor taking control of hardware interruptions, providing them to a guest operating system (OS) for virtualization, and simulating interruption events through service threads running on the hypervisor. The guest OS executes a virtualization interruption service program using interruption injection operations provided by the hypervisor, bypassing the need to respond to hardware interruptions. This approach allows interruption service programs to be executed in a conventional stack environment, eliminating the need for copying and preserving the execution context. A comparative analysis with the virtualization scheme in Xen reveals that the proposed method reduces the overhead associated with field preservation, thereby enabling more efficient interruption response.