By Ed Sperling
Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores.
A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and system for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual cores. http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080301473
In the well-documented history of hypervisors, this marks a major shift in direction. Hypervisors have been used primarily for running virtual machines on a single or multiple cores and for directing applications to take advantage of one or more cores. In effect, they have worked like rudimentary traffic cops, scheduling software functions for processors, memory, logic and buses.
