The concept of using virtual machines was popular in the 1960s and 1970s in both the computing industry and academic research. In these early days of comput- ing, virtual machine monitors (VMMs) allowed multiple users, each running their own single-user operating system instance, to share the same costly mainframe hardware [Goldberg 1974]. Virtual machines lost popularity with the increased sophistication of multi-user operating systems, the rapid drop in hardware cost, and the corresponding proliferation of computers. By the 1980s, the industry had lost interest in virtualization and new computer architectures developed in the 1980s and 1990s did not include the necessary architectural support for virtualization.
In our research work on system software for scalable multiprocessors, we discov- ered that using virtual machine monitors could solve, simply and elegantly, a number of hard system software problems by innovating in a layer below existing operating systems. The key observation from our Disco work [Bugnion et al. 1997] was that, while the high complexity of modern operating systems made innovation difficult, the relative simplicity of a virtual machine monitor and its position in the software stack provided a powerful foothold to address limitations of operating systems.
For me, this was eventually the end of setting up dual booting for Linux, hunting for laptops where hardware support would be above 90%, but never 100%, not even the Asus netbook that I acquired in 2009, which survived multiple distros and travels until last year.
Until WSL2 came to be, it was my way to do GNU/Linux development, on Windows powered laptops.
The earlier 1997 paper on Disco [1] by Bugnion, … was written just before VMware was founded in 1998. It was circulated for review and reputedly made its way to Bill Gates. However, VMware was self funded; so Gates wasn't an early investor. Disco was a lot more similar to VMware's first product before Intel+AMD added VT-x to make hardware assisted virtualization easier.
Bill/MS acquired Connectix’s virtualization technology [1] in 2003. VirtualPC and Virtual Server went on to become Hyper-V and power Azure to this day. VPC was released in 1997 and VMW founded in 1998.
Win4Lin was apparently based on Merge, which debuted in 1985. However, at least with Win4Lin, it depended IIRC on specially patching the windows components to run them in the hypervisor.
Impressive deep dive, this classic ASPLOS paper shows that early hardware virtualization support (like Intel VT-x) didn’t outperform VMware's binary-translated software VMM due to high VM‑exit overheads and rigid models/
The obvious takeaway? Flexible software optimizations often beat hardware if exits are too heavy or inflexible. Makes me wonder: with modern nested virtualization and microarchitectural improvements, are we finally seeing hardware VMMs that consistently match or exceed software VMMs?
Hardware virtualization is cheating by using unsecure enhancements. Like 90% of existing CPUs have security vulnerabilities, that must be patched in OS.
We can have this discussion when hardware gets a few years without major security flaw!
For me, this was eventually the end of setting up dual booting for Linux, hunting for laptops where hardware support would be above 90%, but never 100%, not even the Asus netbook that I acquired in 2009, which survived multiple distros and travels until last year.
Until WSL2 came to be, it was my way to do GNU/Linux development, on Windows powered laptops.
The earlier 1997 paper on Disco [1] by Bugnion, … was written just before VMware was founded in 1998. It was circulated for review and reputedly made its way to Bill Gates. However, VMware was self funded; so Gates wasn't an early investor. Disco was a lot more similar to VMware's first product before Intel+AMD added VT-x to make hardware assisted virtualization easier.
[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/838/Spring2013/Pape...
Bill/MS acquired Connectix’s virtualization technology [1] in 2003. VirtualPC and Virtual Server went on to become Hyper-V and power Azure to this day. VPC was released in 1997 and VMW founded in 1998.
[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/2003/02/19/microsoft-acqui...
VPC/VS were replaced by Hyper-V. They're two very different technologies with no crossover (Type-2 replaced by Type-1, to start with).
> VMware Workstation: Bringing Virtualization to the x86 Architecture (2012) [pdf]
Before vmware, was Win4Linux.
>Before vmware, was Win4Linux.
VMWare Workstation was released in 1999, Win4Lin in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win4Lin
Win4Lin was apparently based on Merge, which debuted in 1985. However, at least with Win4Lin, it depended IIRC on specially patching the windows components to run them in the hypervisor.
Impressive deep dive, this classic ASPLOS paper shows that early hardware virtualization support (like Intel VT-x) didn’t outperform VMware's binary-translated software VMM due to high VM‑exit overheads and rigid models/
The obvious takeaway? Flexible software optimizations often beat hardware if exits are too heavy or inflexible. Makes me wonder: with modern nested virtualization and microarchitectural improvements, are we finally seeing hardware VMMs that consistently match or exceed software VMMs?
We have also worked out how to vmexit less, eg more effective ways to do IO.
Hardware virtualization is cheating by using unsecure enhancements. Like 90% of existing CPUs have security vulnerabilities, that must be patched in OS.
We can have this discussion when hardware gets a few years without major security flaw!