Amit, Nadav and Ben-yehuda, Shmuel and Gordon, Abel and Har’el, Nadav Yosef and Landau, Alexander

US Patent 20,130,174,148, 2013

Systems and methods for enhancing the handling of interrupts in a virtual computing environment are disclosed. A CPU is configured such that the CPU, when in a virtual machine (VM) mode, directs an interrupt to a VM. When in the VM context, a guest in the VM is run with a hypervisor interrupt descriptor table (hypervisor IDT) to determine how the interrupt should be handled. The hypervisor IDT directs an interrupt that is to be handled by the VM to an interrupt handler in a guest IDT without causing a transition to the hypervisor. If an interrupt is to be handled by the hypervisor, the hypervisor IDT causes a transition to the hypervisor.