Lesson 8 of 81974–today8 min
I/O and virtualisation
In July 1974 Gerald Popek and Robert Goldberg published a short paper in Communications of the ACM that answered a precise question: when can a processor be virtualised efficiently, so that a monitor runs unmodified operating systems as guests, each believing it owns the machine? Their answer became a theorem every hypervisor designer knows.
For decades the dominant PC architecture failed their test. Making x86 virtualise well took software tricks first and, from 2005, new hardware.
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Sources
- Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures (G. J. Popek, R. P. Goldberg, CACM 17(7), 1974) — ACM
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, chapter on I/O devices and appendix on virtual machine monitors — R. and A. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin–Madison
- Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023), Operating Systems knowledge area — ACM, IEEE-CS, AAAI