Strategy to Reduce I/O Access Time of Applications in Virtual Machines

Abstract

An input/output (I/O) device can incorporate mechanical devices that require physical movements, such as a hard drive seeking a track for a data read or write. Hence I/O operations on a computer can be extremely slow compared to data processing. When a program conducts many I/O operations, the processor often spends most idling as it waits for the I/O operations to complete. The same holds true for a virtual machine (VM), and to improve the overall performance of a VM, this problem needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a pinning technique, which migrates frequently accessed disk blocks from hard disks to flash memories, to reduce the I/O waiting time. Experimental results show that the start-up times dramatically decrease by up to 38% on average when using this method.

Assessment of DM-cache Running on Virtual Linux

“…Flash memory disks (i.e., solid-state disks (SSDs)) are intended to replace hard disks. They certainly support a much higher I/O rate then hard disks, relative to capacity, but SSDs are much more expensive per byte [3].…”

Analyzing I/O patterns for the design of energy-efficient image servers

“…Several researchers have been working on means of replacing hard disks and optimizing power usage [4], [5], [6], resulting in development of Solid-State Disks (SSDs) comprising NAND flash memory. However, these disks unsatisfactory due to their higher cost and lower capacity compared to hard disks [4]. Thus hard disks remain useful, especially in conjunction with powersaving techniques that can be exploited by disk spin up/down solutions [3], [5].…”