Storage processor with device cache providing physical memory for guest vm

Abstract

Physical memory of a storage processor is organized into a general section and a cache section, where the general section is available as machine memory for instructions and data of an operating system, and the cache section is unavailable as machine memory to the operating system and used by privileged components for caching storage data in connection with processing of storage I/O requests. A cache manager operates with a virtualizing component to allocate and organize units of the cache section into guest physical memory for a guest virtual machine executing on the storage processor. Upon the guest virtual machine accessing memory in a guest virtual memory address space, corresponding physical memory accesses of the guest physical memory are performed. The virtualizing component is a virtual machine monitor such as the kernel virtual machine (KVM) extension of Linux®.