NetVM: high performance and flexible networking using virtualization on commodity platforms
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Virtual machine environments are becoming more common due to the increased performance of commodity hardware and the emergence of cloud computing for large scale applications. As the use of virtual machines continues to grow, performance critical applications will require efficient mechanisms to achieve their tasks.We introduce Nahanni as a mechanism for shared memory communication in virtual machine environments. Nahanni allows virtualized applications, those running inside virtual machines, to communicate through shared memory for both data movement and synchronization when VMs are co-located on the same host machine. We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of Nahanni as part of the QEMU/KVM virtualization platform.We have modified existing communication layers to measure the performance benefit of Nahanni. Through microbenchmarks and applications, we demonstrate that shared memory is a useful and efficient communication mechanism in virtualized environments. Further, we discuss how the design and implementation of Nahanni enables a new class of applications, ones that use structured data, to benefit from the use of shared memory.