Optimizing guest swapping using elastic and transparent memory provisioning on virtualization platform  

作　　者：Xi LI Pengfei ZHANG Rui CHU Huaimin WANG 

机构地区：[1]School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China [2]National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410008, China

出　　处：《Frontiers of Computer Science》2016年第5期908-924,共17页中国计算机科学前沿（英文版）

摘　　要：On virtualization platforms, peak memory de- mand caused by hotspot applications often triggers page swapping in guest OS, causing performance degradation in- side and outside of this virtual machine （VM）. Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between virtual machine monitor （MM） and guest operat- ing system （OS）. Our work aims at utilizing the free memory scattered in multiple hosts in a virtualization environment to improve the performance of guest swapping in a transparent and implicit way. Based on the insightful analysis of behav- ioral characteristics of guest swapping, we design and im- plement a distributed and scalable framework HybridSwap. It dynamically constructs virtual swap pools using various policies, and builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which can adaptively choose different vir- tual swap pools. We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with some benchmarks in different scenar- ios. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed and shows a double performance promotion in some cases. Even in the worst case, the system overhead brought by Hy- bridSwap is acceptable.On virtualization platforms, peak memory de- mand caused by hotspot applications often triggers page swapping in guest OS, causing performance degradation in- side and outside of this virtual machine （VM）. Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between virtual machine monitor （MM） and guest operat- ing system （OS）. Our work aims at utilizing the free memory scattered in multiple hosts in a virtualization environment to improve the performance of guest swapping in a transparent and implicit way. Based on the insightful analysis of behav- ioral characteristics of guest swapping, we design and im- plement a distributed and scalable framework HybridSwap. It dynamically constructs virtual swap pools using various policies, and builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which can adaptively choose different vir- tual swap pools. We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with some benchmarks in different scenar- ios. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed and shows a double performance promotion in some cases. Even in the worst case, the system overhead brought by Hy- bridSwap is acceptable.

关 键 词：VIRTUALIZATION memory management guestswapping performance degradation 

分 类 号：TP311.13[自动化与计算机技术—计算机软件与理论] TP333[自动化与计算机技术—计算机科学与技术]