Huge Page Balloon Support for Virtual Machine Memory Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current virtualization systems face challenges in efficiently managing memory across virtual machines, particularly in accommodating changing memory demands and ensuring secure allocation and access of memory pages between guest and host operating systems.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a system that utilizes a hypervisor to manage memory through 'huge page balloon' support, where a guest operating system allocates contiguous blocks of unused memory to a host operating system, aligning them to huge page sizes, and uses extended page tables for secure mapping and access control.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If memory is allocated dynamically between virtual machines and host system, then hardware utilization improves, but memory allocation complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a hypervisor as an intermediary layer between the host operating system and guest operating systems to manage memory allocation. The hypervisor receives memory allocation requests from the host OS, translates them into guest OS addressable memory regions, and enforces access control policies. This intermediary structure enables dynamic memory allocation while centralizing management complexity in the hypervisor, allowing guest OSes to operate with simplified memory models.
2Reliability
If extended page tables are used for secure mapping, then access control security improves, but memory management overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements extended page tables that segment memory management into distinct hierarchical levels: host OS memory regions, hypervisor-managed intermediate structures, and guest OS virtual address spaces. Each segment maintains its own access control lists and mapping structures, allowing security policies to be enforced at each boundary. This segmentation enables fine-grained access control while distributing the management overhead across multiple manageable layers rather than requiring a single monolithic memory management structure.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods for virtual machine based huge page balloon support are provided. A guest operating system (OS) receives a request from a hypervisor for guest memory to be made available to a host operating system (OS). The guest OS further receives a huge page size of a host page and a quantity of requested guest memory. The guest OS then allocates unused guest memory and transmits at least one address of the allocated guest memory to the hypervisor, where the allocated guest memory is a contiguous block of memory that is at least the size of the huge page size and aligned to the size of the huge page size.