A Comprehensive Implementation and Evaluation of Direct Interrupt Delivery

Abstract

As the performance overhead associated with CPU and memory virtualization becomes largely negligible, research efforts are directed toward reducing the I/O virtualization overhead, which mainly comes from two sources: DMA set-up and payload copy, and interrupt delivery. The advent of SRIOV and MRIOV effectively reduces the DMA-related virtualization overhead to a minimum. Therefore, the last battleground for minimizing virtualization overhead is how to directly deliver every interrupt to its target VM without involving the hypervisor.