Experiments About the Performance of Full Virtualization and Containers on ARM-v8 Platform

Abstract

ARM based devices become more common in mobile devices, servers and embedded systems recent years. With the growing of cloud computing, the demand for virtualization on ARM platform is growing year by year. Traditional full virtualization solutions, such as KVM, extend their supports on ARM platform. Meanwhile, light-weight virtualization solutions, such as docker, also become popular and technically mature these years. Different solutions of virtualization have their own advantages. In order to present the functional difference and to evaluate the performance difference between virtualization solutions, we make a thorough study of these virtualization methods, then design and implement a series of experiments with KVM and docker on an ARM-v8 development board. The result shows that light-weight virtualization achieves better efficiency and usability with sacrifice of isolation and safety to a certain extent. Our work introduces the details of comparison, which can be a guideline for users to choose their solutions of virtualization according to their demands.