Research on the Performance Improvement of Virtual Machine Monitor

• Main Authors: Pei-Chun Hu, 胡佩君
• Other Authors: Li-Chi Feng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66093522653810234117

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 93 === The idea of “Virtualization” is to divide the system resources into multiple execution environments, by applying a concept of “Virtualization Layer”. Virtualization allows a platform to run multiple operating system images simultaneously and each one would behave as it was on the real machine. Since modern computers are sufficiently powerful, using virtualization will be the cost-effective solution to increase the utilization of the computer resources, and provide the “Server Consolidation” scenarios to make IT architecture more manageable. A Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) is the virtualization layer that abstracts the hardware resources for use by the operating systems running on it. While implementing the VMM has brought many noticeable benefits such as system integration, centralized control, operational flexibility and security etc., it is highly possible that this IT technology will be the new trend in the next few years. Therefore, issues of how to improve the execution performance of the VMM will be crucial in the future researches. In this thesis, we attempt to improve the execution performance of “Xen VMM”. Due to the frequently occurred exception of page fault is the main factor that is enough to affect system performance, we offload the page fault handling routine from the upper guest OS, enhancing Xen to have capability of dealing with page fault exceptions generated by guest OSes, and achieve the performance improvement by effectively reducing the number of invoked hypercalls. According to the micro-benchmark evaluations, our system performance is better than the original Xen VMM.