Software techniques to improve virtualized I/O performance on multi-core systems

Abstract

Virtualization technology is now widely deployed on high performance networks such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE). It offers useful features like functional isolation, manageability and live migration. Unfortunately, the overhead of network I/O virtualization significantly degrades the performance of network-intensive applications. Two major factors of loss in I/O performance result from the extra driver domain to process I/O requests and the extra scheduler inside the virtual machine monitor (VMM) for scheduling domains.