Nieh is most well known for his work on virtualization.[1] He was one of the early pioneers of operating-system-level virtualization, introducing key concepts such as process namespaces[2] and file system layers[3] which led to the development of Linux containers and Docker. He was an early proponent of desktop virtualization, conducting many of the early studies demonstrating the feasibility of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. He developed and influenced many key technologies for Arm virtualization, including the Linux ARM hypervisor, KVM ARM,[4] and Arm architecture features to support virtualization host extensions, nested virtualization, and confidential computing.[5] He was also the first to introduce virtual machines and virtual appliances to teach hands-on computer science courses such as operating systems,[6] which has now become common practice at universities all over the world.
^"2019 Newly Elevated Fellows"(PDF). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original(PDF) on December 20, 2018. Retrieved December 20, 2018.
