Eliminating receive livelock in an interrupt-driven kernel
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor
Proceedings of the General Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
ALS '01 Proceedings of the 5th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 5
virtio: towards a de-facto standard for virtual I/O devices
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - Research and developments in the Linux kernel
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
PacketShader: a GPU-accelerated software router
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
The evolution of an x86 virtual machine monitor
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
ELI: bare-metal performance for I/O virtualization
ASPLOS XVII Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
Netmap: a novel framework for fast packet I/O
USENIX ATC'12 Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
Software techniques for avoiding hardware virtualization exits
USENIX ATC'12 Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
Towards exitless and efficient paravirtual I/O
Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference
Bringing Virtualization to the x86 Architecture with the Original VMware Workstation
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
VALE, a switched ethernet for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
ClickOS and the art of network function virtualization
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Most of the work on VM network performance has focused so far on bulk TCP traffic, which covers classical applications of virtualization. Completely new ``paravirtualized devices'' (Xenfront, VIRTIO, vmxnet) have been designed and implemented to improve network throughput. We expect virtualization to become widely used also for different workloads: packet switching devices and middleboxes, Software Defined Networks, etc.. These applications involve very high packet rates that are problematic not only for the hypervisor (which emulates network interfaces) but also for the host itself (which switches packets between guests and physical NICs). In this paper we provide three main results. First, we demonstrate how rates of millions of packets per second can be achieved even within VMs, with limited but targeted modifications on device drivers, hypervisors and the host's virtual switch. Secondly, we show that emulation of conventional NICs (e.g., Intel e1000) is perfectly capable of achieving such packet rates, without requiring completely different device models. Finally, we provide sets of modifications suitable for different use cases (acting only on the guest, or only on the host, or on both) which can improve the network throughput of a VM by 20 times or more. These results are important because they enable a new set of applications within virtual machines. In particular, we achieve guest-to-guest UDP speeds of over 1~Mpps with short frames (and 6~Gbit/s with 1500-byte frames) using a conventional e1000 device, and socket-based sender/receivers. This matches the speed of the OS on bare metal. Furthermore, we reach over 5~Mpps when guests use the netmap API. Our work requires only small changes to device drivers (about 100 lines, both for FreeBSD and Linux version of e1000), similarly small modifications to the hypervisor (we have a QEMU prototype available) and the use of the VALE switch as a network backend. Relevant changes are being incorporated and/or distributed as external patches for FreeBSD, QEMU and Linux.