TY - GEN
T1 - SymCall
T2 - 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE'11
AU - Lange, John R.
AU - Dinda, Peter A
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Symbiotic virtualization is a new approach to system virtualization in which a guest OS targets the native hardware interface as in full system virtualization, but also optionally exposes a software interface that can be used by a VMM, if present, to increase performance and functionality. Neither the VMM nor the OS needs to support the symbiotic virtualization interface to function together, but if both do, both benefit. We describe the design and implementation of the SymCall symbiotic virtualization interface in our publicly available Palacios VMM for modern x86 machines. SymCall makes it possible for Palacios to make clean synchronous upcalls into a symbiotic guest, much like system calls. One use of symcalls is to allow synchronous collection of semantically rich guest data during exit handling in order to enable new VMM features. We describe the implementation of SwapBypass, a VMM service based on SymCall that reconsiders swap decisions made by a symbiotic Linux guest. Finally, we present a detailed performance evaluation of both SwapBypass and SymCall.
AB - Symbiotic virtualization is a new approach to system virtualization in which a guest OS targets the native hardware interface as in full system virtualization, but also optionally exposes a software interface that can be used by a VMM, if present, to increase performance and functionality. Neither the VMM nor the OS needs to support the symbiotic virtualization interface to function together, but if both do, both benefit. We describe the design and implementation of the SymCall symbiotic virtualization interface in our publicly available Palacios VMM for modern x86 machines. SymCall makes it possible for Palacios to make clean synchronous upcalls into a symbiotic guest, much like system calls. One use of symcalls is to allow synchronous collection of semantically rich guest data during exit handling in order to enable new VMM features. We describe the implementation of SwapBypass, a VMM service based on SymCall that reconsiders swap decisions made by a symbiotic Linux guest. Finally, we present a detailed performance evaluation of both SwapBypass and SymCall.
KW - Operating systems
KW - Virtual machine monitors
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79953208265&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79953208265&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1952682.1952707
DO - 10.1145/1952682.1952707
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79953208265
SN - 9781450305013
T3 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2011
SP - 193
EP - 204
BT - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2011
Y2 - 9 March 2011 through 11 March 2011
ER -