Rapid Virtualization Indexing
Encyclopedia
Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI, formerly known as Nested Page Tables during its development) is an AMD second generation hardware-assisted virtualization technology for the processor memory management unit
Memory management unit
A memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...

 (MMU).

A VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....

 research paper found that RVI offers up to 42% gains in performance compared with software-only shadow page table implementation. Tests conducted by Red Hat
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 showed a doubling in performance for OLTP benchmarks.

RVI was introduced in the 3rd generation of Opteron
Opteron
Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...

 processors,
code name Barcelona
AMD K10
The AMD Family 10h is a microprocessor microarchitecture by AMD. Though there were once reports that the K10 had been canceled, the first third-generation Opteron products for servers were launched on September 10, 2007, with the Phenom processors for desktops following and launching on November...

. The Intel equivalent, called Extended Page Table
Extended Page Table
Extended Page Tables is an Intel second generation x86 virtualization technology for the memory management unit . When this feature is active, the ordinary IA-32 page tables translate from linear addresses to guest-physical addresses...

s was introduced in the Nehalem architecture.

Support in software

  • VMware ESX
    VMware ESX
    VMware ESX is an enterprise-level computer virtualization product offered by VMware, Inc. ESX is a component of VMware's larger offering, VMware Infrastructure, and adds management and reliability services to the core server product...

     3.5 and later.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
    Hyper-V
    Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian and formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor-based virtualization system for x86-64 systems. A beta version of Hyper-V was shipped with certain x86-64 editions of Windows Server 2008, and the finalized version was released on June 26,...

     in Windows Server 2008 R2
    Windows Server 2008 R2
    Windows Server 2008 R2 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 and launched on October 22, 2009. According to the Windows Server Team blog, the retail availability was September 14, 2009. It is built on Windows NT 6.1, the same core...

     and later.
  • Linux KVM
    Kernel-based Virtual Machine
    Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions....

     2.6.26 and later.
  • Oracle VM VirtualBox
    VirtualBox
    Oracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by software company Innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products...

     2.0.0 and later.
  • Xen
    Xen
    Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....

     3.2.0 and later

See also

  • AMD-V (codename Pacifica) for the 1st generation AMD hardware virtualization support
  • Extended Page Table
    Extended Page Table
    Extended Page Tables is an Intel second generation x86 virtualization technology for the memory management unit . When this feature is active, the ordinary IA-32 page tables translate from linear addresses to guest-physical addresses...

    s for the Intel equivalent

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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