| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
On February 8, 1999, VMware introduced the first x86 virtualization product, "VMware Virtual Platform", based on earlier research by its founders at Stanford University. VMware filed for a patent on their techniques in October 1998, which was granted as US Patent 6,397,242 on May 28, 2002.
Kevin Lawton started the Plex86 project (originally called "freemware") to create a Free software for x86 virtualization. The focus of the project has since changed to support only Linux as a guest operating system, but prior to that Mr. Lawton published the paper Running multiple operating systems concurrently on an IA32 PC using virtualization techniques, which gives an analysis of what aspects of the x86 architecture are hard to virtualize and some techniques to overcome these difficulties.
Microsoft offers two Windows-based x86 virtualization products, Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual Server 2005, based on technology they acquired from Connectix.Recent research efforts have sought to provide high performance virtualization of x86 by presenting an interface to virtual machines that differs from that of the raw hardware. Operating systems are ported to run over this interface, which does not use the hard-to-virtualize parts of the x86 instruction set. This technique is known as paravirtualization . The research systems Denali , L4 and Xen employ this technique to run modified versions of various operating systems.
AMD has stated that they will release processors with "advanced virtualization technology" code-named "Pacifica". It is not expected to be a copy of Intel's Vanderpool or Silvervale. It appears that some insight into Pacifica may be found in US Patent 6,751,737, filed on October 7, 1999 and granted on June 15, 2004.