Improving Virtual Machine Reliability with Driver Fault Isolation

Abstract

With the development of virtualization technologies, the server resources are maximized by integrating multiple operating systems into a high-performance server. So the server is possible to provide services to more users simultaneously. However, the driver fault still impacts the reliability of the operating system in the virtual machine, and impacts the continuity and stability of services. This paper proposes a architecture to improve the reliability of the virtual machine environments. By monitoring the driver's memory usage, the architecture creates the authorization table. Through setting the corresponding shadow page table in the virtual machine manager of the whole kernel space of the virtual machine, the architecture captures the write operation of the virtual machine. Combing with the authorization table, the correctness of the writing operations can be determined. Our architecture needn't to modify the drivers and is easy to develop. Experimental results show that the architecture can effectively isolate the driver faults, and improve the reliability of the virtual machine environments.