Design of Software Partitioning for X86 Family Processors: HPPAR

Design of Software Partitioning for X86 Family Processors: HPPAR
Authors:MANJUNATH A.E

Abstract: A very large number of computing and I/O resources will be available in a single platform. Partitioning these resources when they were not in a single platform was simple because the hardware was physically in separate boxes. For one thing, the processors did not share a common memory and also the common controllers. Virtualization with commodity hypervisors holds the promise of solving this problem of logical partitioning of resources in a single box. What commodity hypervisors cannot do is create efficient partitions of dedicated resources which are not shared with other partitions. This capability is critical in certain enterprise level class environment. 

Keywords: Partitioning, Hypervisor, Virtual BIOS, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, Single Root I/O Virtualization.

I. INTRODUCTION 

     As in recent years many companies have introduced a software logical partitioning feature, LPARs, on their iSeries servers which uses a firmware layer to create logical partitions. The firmware is able to partition a server into different hardware partitions by having strict control over all memory mapping to physical memory for computation and I/O in each partition. This technique adds flexibility by allowing repartitioning without requiring a reboot of the server. There is a performance tradeoff because of the overhead processing degradation that is required for the memory mapping function. Each of the software partitioning solutions reviewed is differentiated by the processor family that it supports. As such, High-powered partitioning (HPPAR) is architected to uniquely provide a feature set for Intel x64 processors which is comparable to LPARs on IBM’s Power processors. 

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