Introspection-based memory de-duplication and migration

Abstract

Memory virtualization abstracts a physical machine's memory resource and presents to the virtual machines running on it a piece of physical memory that could be shared, compressed and moved. To optimize the memory resource utilization by fully leveraging the flexibility afforded by memory virtualization, it is essential that the hypervisor have some sense of how the guest VMs use their allocated physical memory. One way to do this is virtual machine introspection (VMI), which interprets byte values in a guest memory space into semantically meaningful data structures. However, identifying a guest VM's memory usage information such as free memory pool is non-trivial. This paper describes a bootstrapping VM introspection technique that could accurately extract free memory pool information from multiple versions of Windows and Linux without kernel version-specific hard-coding, how to apply this technique to improve the efficiency of memory de-duplication and memory state migration, and the resulting improvement in memory de-duplication speed, gain in additional memory pages de-duplicated, and reduction in traffic loads associated with memory state migration.