The Fundamental Idea of a Virtual Machine

The fundamental idea behind a virtual machine is to remove the hardware of a single computer and make it a self-contained operating environment that behaves as it is a separate computer. Essentially, the virtual machine is software that executes an application and isolates it from the actual operating system and hardware. CPU scheduling and virtual-memory techniques are used so that an operating system can create the illusion that a process has its own processor with its own (virtual) memory. The virtual machine provides the ability to share the same hardware yet run several different operating systems concurrently. Virtual machine concept

A major difficulty with the virtual machine involves disk systems. For instance, the physical machine has two disk drives but wants to support five virtual machines. The physical machine is unable to allocate a disk drive to each virtual machine because the virtual machine software itself will need substantial disk space to provide virtual memory and spooling. To solve this dilemma, virtual drives that are identical in all respects except for size are provided. The system implements each virtual disk by allocating as many tracks on the physical disks as the virtual disk needs. Implementation of the virtual machine is difficult. A lot of work is required to provide an exact duplicate of the underlying machine, which has both the user mode and kernel mode. The virtual machine software can run in kernel mode since it is the operating system, where the virtual machine itself can only execute in user mode. In a virtual machine implementation, there must be a virtual user mode and a virtual kernel mode, both of which run in a physical user mode.

The operations that cause a transfer from user mode to kernel mode on the physical machine must also cause a transfer from virtual user mode to virtual kernel mode on a virtual machine. There are several advantages with the virtual machine concept. In this environment, the various system resources have complete protection. Each virtual machine is completely isolated from all other virtual machines, so there are no protection problems because there is no sharing of resources. Two approaches have been implemented to provide sharing. First, it is possible to share a virtual disk to share files. This is modeled after a shared physical disk is implemented by software. Second, it is possible to define a network of virtual machines, each virtual machine sending information over the virtual network. This is modeled after physical networks, but is implemented in software.

The virtual machine system is perfect for operating system research and development. Typically, changing an operating system is a difficult and time consuming task. This is because operating systems are quite large and complex programs and it is difficult to be sure that a change in one part of the system will not cause problems (or bugs) in another part of the system. The complexity and power of the operating system makes it dangerous to change it because the operating system executes in kernel mode. Therefore, a wrong change could cause an error that could destroy the entire file system. This is why it is crucial to test all changes to the operating system carefully and thoroughly.

By now you understand that the operating system runs on and controls the entire machine. System programmers are given their own virtual machine, in which system development is done on the virtual machine instead of on a physical machine. Normal system operation seldom needs to be disrupted for system development.

System Boot

The procedure of starting a computer is known as booting the system, which loads the kernel. On most computer systems, a small piece of code known as the bootstrap program, also called the bootstrap loader, locates the kernel, loads it into main memory, and starts its execution. Some computer systems use a two-step process in which a simple bootstrap loader fetches a more complex boot program from disk, which loads the kernel. The bootstrap program can perform a variety of tasks, such as running diagnostics to determine the state of the machine. If the diagnostics pass, then the program can continue booting up. When the CPU receives a reset event, such as rebooting the system, the instruction register is loaded with a predefined memory location where the execution starts. The initial bootstrap program is in that location and is in the form of read-only memory (ROM) because the RAM is in an unknown state at system startup. ROM is convenient because it needs no initialization and cannot be infected by any type of computer virus.