Portable Hypervisor Design for Commercial 64-Bit Android Devices Supporting 32-Bit Compatible Mode

Abstract

We present a hypervisor design that can be applied to any commercial 64-bit Android devices without support of set makers. We achieved the portability by using pure software virtualization while preserving high performance. The contribution of the design is to put the guest OS and the hypervisor together into a single address space which results in avoiding the address space compression problem and reducing major virtualization costs, using 32-bit compatible mode. The design using the single address space makes the hypervisor simple and run fast even with pure software technologies. Prototypical implementation of the design is composed of one kernel module and one user-level program managing virtual machines for Android OS. We have evaluated our design on a commercial mobile phone, Nexus 6P. Since any Android device allows inserting kernel modules and installing user programs on it, we think that our hypervisor can be utilized on any 64-bit ARM-based mobile phones.