SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR LOADING A VIRTUAL MACHINE MONITOR DURING A BOOT PROCESS

摘要

Generally described, aspects of the present disclosure relate to loading an updated virtual machine monitor on the physical computing device during a boot process. The updated virtual machine monitor may be loaded from an update manager external to the virtual machine monitor, such as the offload device or a server connected with the physical computing device over a network. In certain embodiments, the updated virtual machine monitor may be loaded in a tiered process by first loading a startup virtual machine monitor, which automatically updates by loading the updated virtual machine monitor. The startup virtual machine monitor may be a virtual machine monitor with less functionality than the updated machine manager, such as where the startup virtual machine monitor may be a “lite” or simple virtual machine monitor while the updated virtual machine monitor may be a fully functional virtual machine monitor of the most recent update or version.

主权项

1. A computing system comprising:
an offload device comprising an offload device processor and offload device memory storing executable instructions for implementing a startup version of a virtual machine monitor; a physical computing device comprising an interconnect interface, one or more processors and memory, the offload device operably coupled to the physical computing device via the interconnect interface, wherein the one or more processors are configured to execute instructions that, upon execution, configure the physical computing device to:
initiate a boot process;interrupt the boot process upon receiving a boot process interrupt from the offload device;load the startup version of the virtual machine manager from the offload device version into memory;prior to completing the boot process, request an update to the startup virtual machine monitor from an update manager external to the physical computing device;receive the requested update to the virtual machine monitor;load the received update to the virtual machine monitor; andcomplete the boot process using the updated version of the virtual machine monitor.