High performance VMM-bypass I/O in virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • Jiuxing Liu;Wei Huang;Bulent Abali;Dhabaleswar K. Panda

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center;The Ohio State University;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center;The Ohio State University

  • Venue:
  • ATEC '06 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical Conference
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Currently, I/O device virtualization models in virtual machine (VM) environments require involvement of a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and/or a privileged VM for each I/O operation, which may turn out to be a performance bottleneck for systems with high I/O demands, especially those equipped with modern high speed interconnects such as InfiniBand. In this paper, we propose a new device virtualization model called VMM-bypass I/O, which extends the idea of OS-bypass originated from user-level communication. Essentially, VMM-bypass allows time-critical I/O operations to be carried out directly in guest VMs without involvement of the VMM and/or a privileged VM. By exploiting the intelligence found in modern high speed network interfaces, VMM-bypass can significantly improve I/O and communication performance for VMs without sacrificing safety or isolation. To demonstrate the idea of VMM-bypass, we have developed a prototype called Xen-IB, which offers InfiniBand virtualization support in the Xen 3.0 VM environment. Xen-IB runs with current InfiniBand hardware and does not require modifications to existing user-level applications or kernel-level drivers that use InfiniBand. Our performance measurements show that Xen-IB is able to achieve nearly the same raw performance as the original InfiniBand driver running in a non-virtualized environment.