2026/08/08 –, TR213
This talk provides an overall introduction to virtualization technology. The speaker begins with the basic concepts and a brief history of virtualization, introducing virtual machines and hypervisors. We then introduce memory virtualization and address translation, including virtual memory, paging, and the roles of the MMU and TLB.
Next, we show how virtual machine executes guest system's instructions through direct execution, enabled by hardware-assisted virtualization such as KVM and Virtualization.framework. We contrast this with emulation approaches, including interpretation and JIT compilation.
Finally, we discuss I/O virtualization, focusing on VirtIO. We show how emulators and hypervisors such as QEMU and ARCN efficiently virtualize devices, including disks, input devices, and graphics, through VirtIO.
By the end of this session, the audience will have a clear mental model of how modern VMs and containers work under the hood.
Sheng-Wen (Colin) Cheng is a system software engineer with the Platform Security Controller (PSC) team at NVIDIA, where he develops secure bootloader software to ensure system integrity during the boot process. Beyond his role at NVIDIA, he builds low-level software at the intersection of robotics, control engineering, and real-time systems.
He is also an active open-source contributor and has presented his work at leading open-source events, including Open Source Summit organized by the Linux Foundation.