Virtualization
Hypervisor architectures, Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware assistance, Extended Page Tables (EPT), virtio I/O, container namespaces, and live migration.
Type-1 vs Type-2 hypervisors, Popek-Goldberg virtualization requirements, Intel VT-x VMX root/non-root execution, and VMCS structures.
Hypervisor Architectures & Hardware Assistance
Examine bare-metal vs hosted hypervisors, the classic x86 virtualization hole, VT-x VMCS state fields, and VM-Exit cycle latency.
Two-dimensional page tables (EPT/NPT), TLB VPID tagging, memory ballooning, KSM deduplication, and virtio ring buffers.
Memory & I/O Virtualization Mechanics
Examine Extended Page Tables, memory overcommit deduplication, virtio circular virtqueues, and SR-IOV PCIe hardware pass-through.
OS-level virtualization, the 8 Linux namespaces, Cgroups v2 CFS bandwidth throttling, and OverlayFS copy-on-write filesystems.
Containerization Primitives - Namespaces & Cgroups
Deconstruct Linux kernel namespace isolation, cgroup CFS scheduling quota calculations, and OverlayFS layer copy-on-write semantics.
QCOW2 cluster allocation tables, copy-on-write snapshots, iterative pre-copy live migration, and post-copy userfaultfd.
Virtual Disks, Snapshots & Migration
Explore QCOW2 two-level L1/L2 table lookups, live migration pre-copy convergence formulas, and post-copy on-demand paging.