Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
Concurrent Direct Network Access for Virtual Machine Monitors
HPCA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
Scheduling I/O in virtual machine monitors
Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Inter-domain socket communications supporting high performance and full binary compatibility on Xen
Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Protection strategies for direct access to virtualized I/O devices
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
Bridging the gap between software and hardware techniques for I/O virtualization
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
Achieving 10 Gb/s using safe and transparent network interface virtualization
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
XenSocket: a high-throughput interdomain transport for virtual machines
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 2007 International Conference on Middleware
Getting 10 Gb/s from Xen: safe and fast device access from unprivileged domains
Euro-Par'07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Parallel processing
Packet aggregation based network I/O virtualization for cloud computing
Computer Communications
A smart HPC interconnect for clusters of virtual machines
Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 2
Coexisting scheduling policies boosting i/o virtual machines
Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Parallel Processing - Volume 2
Reliable device sharing mechanisms for Dual-OS embedded trusted computing
TRUST'12 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ACM SIGOPS 24th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
From L3 to seL4 what have we learnt in 20 years of L4 microkernels?
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
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Xen's memory sharing mechanism, called the grant mechanism, is used to share I/O buffers in guest domains' memory with a driver domain. Previous studies have identified the grant mechanism as a significant source of network I/O overhead in Xen. This paper describes a redesigned grant mechanism to significantly reduce the associated overheads. Unlike the original grant mechanism, the new mechanism allows guest domains to unilaterally issue and revoke grants. As a result, the new mechanism makes it simple for the guest OS to reduce the number of grant issue and revoke operations that are needed for I/O by taking advantage of temporal and/or spatial locality in its use of I/O buffers. Another benefit of the new mechanism is that it provides a unified interface for memory sharing, whether between guest and driver domains, or between guest domains and I/O devices using IOMMU hardware. We have developed an implementation of the new grant mechanism that fully supports driver domains, but not yet IOMMUs. The paper presents performance results using this implementation which show that the new mechanism reduces per-packet overhead by up to 31% and increases network throughput by up to 52%.