Binary-Compatible User-Mode Polling-Based Inter-VM Communication Techniques Using Shared Memory

Jihong Min, Juhyung Park, Joonseok Park

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2020.47.11.1015

Virtual machines commonly use TCP/IP protocol to exchange data with the host or other virtual machines, but the protocol is inefficient. Communication using inter-VM shared memory can be used for better efficiency, but a disadvantage forces existing TCP/IP-based programs to be reprogrammed or recompiled. There have been several studies on the binary-compatible inter-VM shared memory-based communication methods to resolve this issue, yet the overheads exist. In this paper, we propose techniques that reduce the overheads of the current binary-compatible inter-VM shared memory-based communication methods. Our scheme bypasses the existing network stack with function hooking to TCP/IP library, and introduces the transmission queue per connection and user-mode polling technique to remove the kernel-mode switching overhead. The experiment results show that the latency can be reduced by 96.96% and throughtput can be increased by 222.24% on average by using the proposed techniques compared to the existing virtual network.