Hypervisor - Mainframe Origins

Mainframe Origins

The first hypervisors providing full virtualization, were the test tool, SIMMON, and IBM's one-off research CP-40 system, which began production use in January 1967, and became the first version of IBM's CP/CMS operating system. CP-40 ran on a S/360-40 that was modified at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center to support Dynamic Address Translation, a key feature that allowed virtualization. Prior to this time, computer hardware had only been virtualized enough to allow multiple user applications to run concurrently (see CTSS and IBM M44/44X). With CP-40, the hardware's supervisor state was virtualized as well, allowing multiple operating systems to run concurrently in separate virtual machine contexts.

Programmers soon re-implemented CP-40 (as CP-67) for the IBM System/360-67, the first production computer-system capable of full virtualization. IBM first shipped this machine in 1966; it included page-translation-table hardware for virtual memory, and other techniques that allowed a full virtualization of all kernel tasks, including I/O and interrupt handling. (Note that its "official" operating system, the ill-fated TSS/360, did not employ full virtualization.) Both CP-40 and CP-67 began production use in 1967. CP/CMS was available to IBM customers from 1968 to 1972, in source code form without support.

CP/CMS formed part of IBM's attempt to build robust time-sharing systems for its mainframe computers. By running multiple operating systems concurrently, the hypervisor increased system robustness and stability: Even if one operating system crashed, the others would continue working without interruption. Indeed, this even allowed beta or experimental versions of operating systems – or even of new hardware – to be deployed and debugged, without jeopardizing the stable main production system, and without requiring costly additional development systems.

IBM announced its System/370 series in 1970 without any virtualization features, but added them in the August 1972 Advanced Function announcement. Virtualization has been featured in all successor systems. (All modern-day (as of 2009) IBM mainframes, such as the zSeries line, retain backwards-compatibility with the 1960s-era IBM S/360 line.) The 1972 announcement also included VM/370, a reimplementation of CP/CMS for the S/370. Unlike CP/CMS, IBM provided support for this version (though it was still distributed in source code form for several releases). VM stands for Virtual Machine, emphasizing that all, and not just some, of the hardware interfaces are virtualized. Both VM and CP/CMS enjoyed early acceptance and rapid development by universities, corporate users, and time-sharing vendors, as well as within IBM. Users played an active role in ongoing development, anticipating trends seen in modern open source projects. However, in a series of disputed and bitter battles, time-sharing lost out to batch processing through IBM political infighting, and VM remained IBM's "other" mainframe operating system for decades, losing to MVS. It enjoyed a resurgence of popularity and support from 2000 as the z/VM product, for example as the platform for Linux for zSeries.

As mentioned above, the VM control program includes a hypervisor-call handler that intercepts DIAG ("Diagnose") instructions used within a virtual machine. This provides fast-path non-virtualized execution of file-system access and other operations. (DIAG is a model-dependent privileged instruction, not used in normal programming, and thus is not virtualized. It is therefore available for use as a signal to the "host" operating system.) When first implemented in CP/CMS release 3.1, this use of DIAG provided an operating system interface that was analogous to the System/360 Supervisor Call instruction (SVC), but that did not require altering or extending the system's virtualization of SVC.

In 1985 IBM introduced the PR/SM hypervisor to manage logical partitions (LPAR).