F-VT: A Friendly Virtualization Framework

Recently, virtualization attracts a lot of attention from server-side and client-side applications, even on embedded systems. Virtualization is adopted on client-side machines to enhance both user experience and collaboration with cloud servers. The characteristic of client-side virtualization makes it significantly different from the traditional virtualization for high-performance servers. For example, in many related projects of server-side virtualization, they usually rely on a specific operating system (OS) for the management of virtual machines. However, not all client-side users are familiar with the specific OS and, more specifically, the applications and device drivers running on it. Therefore, we propose a friendly framework called F-VT, which can replace the specific OS with any other OS friendly to users. To prove its feasibility, we develop a prototype to manage virtual machines on Windows XP by combining both Para virtualization and pass-through techniques. We also conduct experiments on network device to evaluate performance. The results show that F-VT can achieve about 96% performance with about 0.2% overhead as compared with native network devices.