Paravirtualizing TCP

  • Authors:
  • Audun Nordal;Åge Kvalnes;Dag Johansen

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway;University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway;University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing Date
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Virtualization has proven consolidation and isolation benefits, but invariably incurs an overhead. This overhead especially penalizes latency sensitive tasks such as tcp processing, because such processing only occurs when a guest is scheduled. We evaluate a system where tcp is paravirtualized. All guest tcp processing below the socket interface takes place in the hypervisor, which enables rapid response to protocol state changes. We have built Leulo, a prototype hypervisor, and a modified Linux guest kernel that outperforms the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and approaches native performance for certain workloads in an http bench-mark.