Jungsub Shin  Hagyoung Kim

Xen ARM Hypervisor Virtual Machine vCPU I/O latency Event

According to the hypervisor scheduler, the vCPU (virtual CPU) operates under two states: the running state and the stop state. When the vCPU is in the stop state, incoming events are delayed until that vCPU"s state changes to the running state. The latency in handling such events that are sent to the vCPU is regarded as the I/O latency. Since a SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) VM (virtual machine) incorporates multiple vCPUs, the event latency on a SMP VM can vary according to specific vCPU that receives the event. In this paper, we propose a new scheme named event routing that sends events according to the operation state of each vCPU to reduce the event latency on an SMP VM. We implemented the proposed event routing scheme in Xen ARM hypervisor and confirmed the reduction of I/O latency from measuring the network RTT (round trip time) and the TCP bandwidth under a variety of testing conditions. The network RTT decreases by up to 94% and the TCP bandwidth increases up to 35% when compare to native Xen ARM.