High performance and scalable I/O virtualization via self-virtualized devices

Raj, Himanshu; Schwan, Karsten

doi:10.1145/1272366.1272390

Cited by 161 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Several research groups are exploring the performance, potential, and drawbacks of current virtualization technologies for HPC systems [8]. These studies seem to converge to two conclusions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…The second conclusion of ongoing research on virtualization for HPC environments is that, though extensively studied, current paravirtualization frameworks still impose bottlenecks for HPC applications. In particular, frequent context switches between virtual machines and the hypervisor and extensive data copying, hurt the performance of applications with high demands for I/O or communication [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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VT-ASOS: Holistic system software customization for many cores

Nikolopoulos

Back

Tripathi

et al. 2008

2008 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

VT-ASOS: Holistic system software customization for many cores

Nikolopoulos

Back

Tripathi

et al. 2008

2008 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing

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“…Nevertheless, network access in virtualized environment is still slower than that in the native environment since exits are still generated during the notification and the completion. Many previous studies [5], [7]- [10] show the context switch to be a major source of device virtualization overhead. In addition, since the virtual machine only accesses para-virtualized device drivers to deliver the network request, I/O stacks such as the TCP/IP layer in the guest OS are obviously unnecessary and only increase the virtualization overhead; network packets are handled twice on both the guest and the host because the host should rebuild or modify the packets with the configuration of the physical network, whereas the guest OS build packets with the configuration of virtualized network.…”

Section: Network Virtualization Backgroundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

vCanal: Paravirtual Socket Library towards Fast Networking in Virtualized Environment

Lee

Min

Eom

2016

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYVirtualization is no longer an emerging research area since the virtual processor and memory operate as efficiently as the physical ones. However, I/O performance is still restricted by the virtualization overhead caused by the costly and complex I/O virtualization mechanism, in particular by massive exits occurring on the guest-host switch and redundant processing of the I/O stacks at both guest and host. A para-virtual device driver may reduce the number of exits to the hypervisor, whereas the network stacks in the guest OS are still duplicated. Previous work proposed a socket-outsourcing technique that bypasses the redundant guest network stack by delivering the network request directly to the host. However, even by bypassing the redundant network paths in the guest OS, the obtained performance was still below 60% of the native device, since notifications of completion still depended on the hypervisor. In this paper, we propose vCanal, a novel network virtualization framework, to improve the performance of network access in the virtual machine toward that of the native machine. Implementation of vCanal reached 96% of the native TCP throughput, increasing the UDP latency by only 4% compared to the native latency. key words: device virtualization, multicore processor, para-virtual library, concurrent queue, polling-based notification

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“…On the contrary, the passthrough approach assigns one physical device exclusively to one VM that has full control and direct access to most parts of the assigned hardware. This has the advantage of significantly reducing the main bottleneck of virtual environments: the overhead of I/O operations [17,18,19,20,21]. Unfortunately, direct device assignment also raises several security concerns.…”

Section: Direct Device Assignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the feasibility of software attacks on commodity virtual machine monitors via direct device assignment

Pék

Lanzi

Srivastava

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security

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The security of virtual machine monitors (VMMs) is a challenging and active field of research. In particular, due to the increasing significance of hardware virtualization in cloud solutions, it is important to clearly understand existing and arising VMM-related threats. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of confusion around this topic as many attacks presented in the past have never been implemented in practice or tested in a realistic scenario.In this paper, we shed light on VM related threats and defences by implementing, testing, and categorizing a wide range of known and unknown attacks based on directly assigned devices. We executed these attacks on an exhaustive set of VMM configurations to determine their potential impact. Our experiments suggest that most of the previously known attacks are ineffective in current VMM setups.We also developed an automatic tool, called PTFuzz, to discover hardware-level problems that affects current VMMs. By using PTFuzz, we found several cases of unexpected hardware behaviour, and a major vulnerability on Intel platforms that potentially impacts a large set of machines used in the wild. These vulnerabilities affect unprivileged virtual machines that use a directly assigned device (e.g., network card) and have all the existing hardware protection mechanisms enabled. Such vulnerabilities either allow an attacker to generate a host-side interrupt or hardware faults, violating expected isolation properties. These can cause host software (e.g., VMM) halt as well as they might open the door for practical VMM exploitations.We believe that our study can help cloud providers and researchers to better understand the limitations of their current architectures to provide secure hardware virtualization and prepare for future attacks.

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High performance and scalable I/O virtualization via self-virtualized devices

Cited by 161 publications

References 16 publications

VT-ASOS: Holistic system software customization for many cores

VT-ASOS: Holistic system software customization for many cores

vCanal: Paravirtual Socket Library towards Fast Networking in Virtualized Environment

On the feasibility of software attacks on commodity virtual machine monitors via direct device assignment

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