Diplomarbeit Adding SMP Support to a User-Level VMM

Virtualization is a well-known technique to facilitate a variety of use cases in both desktop and server environments. Increasingly, security becomes an important aspect of virtualiza-tion because it allows for consolidating multiple workloads on a single physical machine in a protected manner. Recent processor development shifted from increasing single-core performance to integrating multiple cores onto one chip, resulting from the physical limits imposed on the design of microprocessors. It was only a question of time until virtualization followed this trend and supported running several virtual machines truly in parallel, at first multiple single-core ones, then even virtual multi-core. In the full virtualization solution of the TU Dresden, the NOVA OS Virtualization Architecture (NOVA), SMP is only supported in the first variant, while multiple CPUs of a guest system have to share the same physi-cal core. The goal of this thesis is to explore how this limitation can be eliminated with maximum efficiency, passing on as much available compute power to the guest as possi-ble. By identifying and enhancing the critical synchronization mechanisms inside the VMM, the presented solution accounts for maximum scalability in the current environment whil