Virtual machine interface ("VMI") may refer to a communication protocol for running parallel programs on a distributed memory

Distributed memory

In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiple-processor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data is required, the computational task must communicate with one or more remote processors...

 system.

Virtual Machine Interface is also the name given by VMware

VMware

VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....

 to the proposed open standard

Open standard

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed . There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage....

 protocol that guest operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s can use to communicate with the hypervisor

Hypervisor

In computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager , is one of many hardware virtualization techniques that allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. It is so named because it is conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program...

 of a virtual machine

Virtual machine

A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...

. An implementation of this standard was merged in the main Linux kernel

Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

version 2.6.21. A number of popular
GNU/Linux distributions now ship with VMI support enabled by default. Since newer AMD and Intel CPUs allow for more efficient virtualization, VMI is being obsoleted and VMI support will be removed from Linux kernel in 2.6.37 and from VMware products in 2010–2011 timeframe
.

External links

• The VMI virtualization interface – article in lwn.net