TeleVM: A Lightweight Virtual Machine for RISC-V Architecture

Serverless computing has become an important paradigm in cloud computing due to its advantages such as fast large-scale deployment and pay-as-you-go charging model. Due to shared infrastructure and multi-tenant environments, serverless applications have high security requirements. Traditional virtual machines and containers cannot fully meet the requirements of serverless applications. Therefore, lightweight virtual machine technology has emerged, which can reduce overhead and boot time while ensuring security. In this letter, we propose TeleVM, a lightweight virtual machine for RISC-V architecture. TeleVM can achieve strong isolation through the hypervisor extension of RISC-V. Compared with traditional virtual machines, TeleVM only implements a small number of IO devices and functions, which can effectively reduce memory overhead and boot time. We compared TeleVM and QEMU+KVM through experiments. Compared to QEMU+KVM, the boot time and memory overhead of TeleVM have decreased by 74% and 90% respectively. This work further improves the cloud computing software ecosystem of RISC-V architecture and promotes the use of RISC-V architecture in cloud computing scenarios.