Towards exitless and efficient paravirtual I/O

Gordon, Abel; Har'El, Nadav; Landau, Alex; Ben-Yehuda, Muli; Traeger, Avishay

doi:10.1145/2367589.2367593

Cited by 39 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…To optimize paravirtual network setups, Gordon et al [11] present specific improvements to the KVM stack in order to minimize the inter-core communication overhead imposed by guest-to-host and hostto-guest notifications. However, their work is focused on TCP/IP workloads and do not present comparable results to our approach; for instance, they use 1 core for the host, which gets saturated at ≈ 390 MB/sec.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

Nanos

Koziris

2014

Journal of Systems and Software

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

Nanos

Koziris

2014

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…However, its application is very limited because ELI works only for direct assigned devices [6]. ELVIS [8] proposes an exitless para-virtual I/O model, under which guests and the hypervisor, running on distinct cores, exchange exitless notifications instead of costly exitbased notification. However, it focuses on the scalability when host machine runs many VMs in parallel.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Delegating OpenGL commands to host for hardware support in virtualized environments

Joo

Lee

Eom

2014

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication

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Today, the virtualization is a very important technology which is widely used in various area, from small mobile devices to virtual machine (VM) servers for large scale cloud computing. Now, hypervisor provides CPU and memory resources for the VMs with high performance like native machine through many researches on the virtualized environment. However, device virtualization techniques, especially those for GPU devices, are less studied than the other virtualization techniques. It is a chief obstacle to perform graphics processing in the virtualized environment. Since VM cannot access the physical GPU device directly, existing GPU device virtualization techniques have some limitations on 3D acceleration. Especially, those techniques spend more time to perform graphics processing because they use software rendering on the Mesa Software Fallback module in the guest OS. In this paper, we propose a GPU device virtualization technique that can improve OpenGL graphics performance. By using concurrent I/O request queue between the host emulation process and the guest OS, GPU device can be accessed directly. Our scheme can avoid graphics processing in the graphics stack of the guest OS and also can reduce vmexit overheads. The emulation process can perform the graphics processing using GPU hardware rendering. Our evaluation shows that the proposed technique has about 2.5x higher frame rate than existing Mesa software rendering.

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“…Interrupt coalescing and Virtual Receive Side Scaling have been studied in [10] within Xen; the system used in that paper is limited to about 100 Kpps per core, and the solutions proposed impose a heavy latency/throughput tradeoff and burn massive amounts of resources to scale performance. ELVIS [9] addresses the reduction of VM exits in guest-host notifications: a core on the host monitors notifications posted by the guest(s) using shared memory, whereas inter-processor interrupts are used in the other direction, delivered directly to the guest as in the ELI case.…”

Section: High Speed Networkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speeding up packet I/O in virtual machines

Rizzo

Lettieri

Maffione

2013

Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems

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Most of the work on VM network performance has focused so far on bulk TCP traffic, which covers classical applications of virtualization. Completely new "paravirtualized devices" (Xenfront, VIRTIO, vmxnet) have been designed and implemented to improve network throughput.We expect virtualization to become widely used also for different workloads: packet switching devices and middleboxes, Software Defined Networks, etc.. These applications involve very high packet rates that are problematic not only for the hypervisor (which emulates network interfaces) but also for the host itself (which switches packets between guests and physical NICs).In this paper we provide three main results. First, we demonstrate how rates of millions of packets per second can be achieved even within VMs, with limited but targeted modifications on device drivers, hypervisors and the host's virtual switch. Secondly, we show that emulation of conventional NICs (e.g., Intel e1000) is perfectly capable of achieving such packet rates, without requiring completely different device models. Finally, we provide sets of modifications suitable for different use cases (acting only on the guest, or only on the host, or on both) which can improve the network throughput of a VM by 20 times or more.These results are important because they enable a new set of applications within virtual machines.In particular, we achieve guest-to-guest UDP speeds of over 1 Mpps with short frames (and 6 Gbit/s with 1500-byte frames) using a conventional e1000 device, and socket-based sender/receivers. This matches the speed of the OS on bare metal. Furthermore, we reach over 5 Mpps when guests use the netmap API.Our work requires only small changes to device drivers (about 100 lines, both for FreeBSD and Linux version of e1000), similarly small modifications to the hypervisor (we have a QEMU prototype available) and the use of the VALE switch as a network backend. Relevant changes are being incorporated and/or distributed as external patches for FreeBSD, QEMU and Linux.

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Towards exitless and efficient paravirtual I/O

Cited by 39 publications

References 15 publications

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

Delegating OpenGL commands to host for hardware support in virtualized environments

Speeding up packet I/O in virtual machines

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