This paper analyzes the host cache effectiveness in full virtualization, particularly associated with journaling of guests. We observe that the journal access of guests degrades cache performance largely due to the write-once access pattern and the frequent sync operations. To remedy this problem, we design and implement a novel caching policy, called PDC (Pollution Defensive Caching), that detects the journal accesses and prevents them from entering the host cache. The proposed PDC is implemented in QEMU-KVM 2.1 on Linux 4.14 and provides 3-32% performance improvement for various file and I/O benchmarks.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.