On 13.10.2010 21:35, Geoff Nordli wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Ruben Van den Bossche
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 1:59 AM
Dear VBox developers,
We are currently extending work performed by Olivier Berghmans regarding
nested virtualization (running a virtual machine inside another virtual
machine).
Because none of us has experience with hypervisor development, we would
very
much appreciate it if you could confirm or correct one of our assumptions.
In our experiments, nesting DBT based hypervisors appears impossible when
using
a base hypervisor based on DBT. Using first generation hardware support as
the
base hypervisor results in partial success depending on the hypervisor used
(
VMWare, Xen, KVM, Virtualbox ). When we move the base hypervisor to a
machine with second generation hardware support most problems disappear.
We think the most likely reason for the problems with DBT or first gen.
hardware support as base hypervisor technique are the results of shadow
paging,
and more specifically the nested shadow paging which occurs when nesting
DBT
on DBT or first gen HWS. Perhaps some functionality is not replicated
exactly as
one would expect on physical hardware? Maybe some shortcuts result in
corrupt
memory if they are used in nested hypervisors? If you could confirm these
assumptions or perhaps even give some greater insight in these problems, we
would be extremely grateful.
Kind Regards,
Sam Verboven and Ruben Van den Bossche
PhD Students
University of Antwerp
Being able to do nested virtualization would be an amazing feature in
VirtualBox!!!!
Not sure if you're aware that such "amazing" statements tend to
discredit the message you're trying to bring across. There are so many
features VirtualBox could have, and for some reason this word is only
used in a context where there is most likely near zero customer demand
for something which requires weeks of work for the most skilled engineers.
That said, of course it would be an amazing feature ;)
We are in the training field, and if we could run hypervisor related
training like VMWare and Hyper-V on vbox that would be an outrageously
amazing feature.
What I know is that one can run VirtualBox (in software virtualization
mode) in a VirtualBox VM in hardware virtualization mode. The same
should work for other virtualizers, although I personally haven't tried.
Klaus
In addition some software like the new Windows Phone 7 software emulator
uses virtualization.
Geoff
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