"It’s an app. It’s a hypervisor. It’s a hypapp.": Design and Implementation of an eXtensible and Modular Hypervisor Framework

This paper presents our efforts in developing XMHF, an eXtensible and Modular Hypervisor Framework. XMHF takes a developer-centric approach to hypervisor design and implementation, and strives to be a comprehensible and flexible platform for performing hypervisor research and development. XMHF encapsulates common hypervisor core functionality in a framework that allows others to build custom hypervisor-based solutions (called “hypapps”) while freeing them from a considerable amount of wheel-reinventing that is often associated with such efforts. We are encouraged by the end result – a clean, barebones hypervisor framework with desirable performance characteristics and an architecture amenable to formal analysis.