CompSC: live migration with pass-through devices

  • Authors:

  • Zhenhao Pan;Yaozu Dong;Yu Chen;Lei Zhang;Zhijiao Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Intel Asia-Pacific Research and Development Ltd, Shanghai, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • VEE '12 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS conference on Virtual Execution Environments
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Live migration is one of the most important features of virtualization technology. With regard to recent virtualization techniques, performance of network I/O is critical. Current network I/O virtualization (e.g. Para-virtualized I/O, VMDq) has a significant performance gap with native network I/O. Pass-through network devices have near native performance, however, they have thus far prevented live migration. No existing methods solve the problem of live migration with pass-through devices perfectly. In this paper, we propose CompSC: a solution of hardware state migration that will enable the live migration support of pass-through devices. We go on to apply CompSC to SR-IOV network interface controllers. We discuss the attributes of different hardware states in pass-through devices and migrate them with corresponding techniques. Our experiments show that CompSC enables live migration on an Intel 82599 VF with a throughput 282.66% higher than para-virtualized devices. In addition, service downtime during live migration is 42.9% less than para-virtualized devices.