Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Memory resource management in VMware ESX server
OSDI '02 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementationCopyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading
A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Performance and security lessons learned from virtualizing the alpha processor
Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Characterizing the TLB Behavior of Emerging Parallel Workloads on Chip Multiprocessors
PACT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 18th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
Translation caching: skip, don't walk (the page table)
Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A Case for Alternative Nested Paging Models for Virtualized Systems
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Selective hardware/software memory virtualization
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Performance characteristics of explicit superpage support
ISCA'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Computer Architecture
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Virtual address translation in a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for modern x86 processors can be implemented using a software approach known as shadow paging or a hardware approach known as nested paging. Most VMMs, including our Palacios VMM, support both. Using a range of benchmark measurements, we show that which approach is preferable for achieving high application performance under virtualization is workload dependent, and that the performance differences between the two approaches can be substantial. We have developed an algorithm, based on measuring the TLB miss rate and the VMM exit rate for paging-related exits, for measuring the performance of the current paging approach during normal execution and predicting when switching approaches is likely to be beneficial to the application. We combine this with new support in Palacios for switching paging approaches at any time to implement a dynamic adaptive paging approach called DAV2M for dynamically adaptive virtualized virtual memory. DAV2M attempts to deliver application performance that is the same or better than the best static approach for a given workload. Our evaluation shows that it does so, and, for a range of benchmarks, DAV2M delivers performance within 5--8% of native, reducing overheads by as much as a factor of four. Although both the shadow and nested paging approaches are evolving, the dynamic adaptive approach can combine their best qualities.