Inter-domain socket communications supporting high performance and full binary compatibility on Xen

  • Authors:

  • Kangho Kim;Cheiyol Kim;Sung-In Jung;Hyun-Sup Shin;Jin-Soo Kim

  • Affiliations:

  • Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, South Korea;Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, South Korea;Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, South Korea;ETRI/UST, Daejeon, South Korea;KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Communication performance between two processes in their own domains on the same physical machine gets improved but it does not reach our expectation. This paper presents the design and implementation of high-performance inter-domain communication mechanism, called XWAY, that maintains binary compatibility for applications written in standard socket interface. As a result of our survey, we found that three overheads mainly contribute to the poor performance; those are TCP/IP processing cost in each domain, page flipping overhead, and long communication path between both sides of a socket. XWAY achieves high performance by bypassing TCP/IP stacks, avoiding page flipping overhead, and providing a direct, accelerated communication path between domains in the same machine. Moreover, we introduce the XWAY socket architecture to support full binary compatibility with as little effort as possible. We implemented our design on Xen 3.0.3-0 with Linux kernel 2.6.16.29, and evaluated basic performance, the speed of file transfer, DBT-1 benchmark, and binary compatibility using binary image of real socket applications. In our tests, we have proved that XWAY realizes the high performance that is comparable to UNIX domain socket and ensures full binary compatibility. The basic performance of XWAY, measured with netperf, shows minimum latency of 15.6 usec and peak bandwidth of 4.7Gbps, which is superior to that of native TCP socket. We have also examined whether several popular applications using TCP socket can be executed on XWAY with their own binary images. Those applications worked perfectly well.