Power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for mobile virtualization systems

Abstract

A virtualized system generally suffers from low I/O performance, mainly caused by its inherent abstraction overhead and frequent CPU transitions between the guest and hypervisor modes. The recent research of polling-based I/O virtualization partly solved the problem, but excessive polling trades intensive CPU usage for higher performance. This article presents a power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for a virtual machine, which allows us to use it even with a limited number of CPU cores in mobile or embedded systems. Our framework monitors system status, and dynamically switches the I/O process mode between the exit and polling modes, depending on the amounts of current I/O requests and CPU utilization. It also dynamically controls the polling interval to reduce redundant polling. The highly dynamic nature of our framework leads to improvements in I/O performance with lower CPU usage as well. Our experiments showed that our framework outperformed the existing exit-based mechanisms by 10.8 % higher I/O throughput, maintaining similar CPU usage by only 3.1 % increment. In comparison to the systems solely based on the polling mechanism, ours reduced the CPU usage roughly down to 10.0 % with no or negligible performance loss.