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Improving Live Migration Efficiency in QEMU: A Paravirtualized Approach

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High Performance Computing (ISC High Performance 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13999))

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Abstract

Virtual Machines are the key technology in cloud computing. In order to upgrade, repair or service the physical machine where a Virtual Machine is hosted, a common practice is to live-migrate the Virtual Machine to a different server. This involves copying all the guest memory over the network, which may take a non-negligible amount of time. In this work, we propose a technique to speed up the migration time by reducing the amount of guest memory to be transferred with the help of the guest OS. In particular, during live-migration, a paravirtualized driver running in the guest kernel obtains, and sends to the Virtual Machine Monitor, the list of guest page frames that are currently unused. The VMM can then safely skip these pages during the copy. We have integrated this technique in the live-migration implementation of QEMU [3], and we show the effects of our work in some experiments comparing the results against QEMU default implementation and VirtIO-Balloon.

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Acknowledgments

Work partially supported by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (MUR) in the framework of the FoReLab project (Departments of Excellence).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Filippo Storniolo, Luigi Leonardi & Giuseppe Lettieri

Authors
  1. Filippo Storniolo
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  2. Luigi Leonardi
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  3. Giuseppe Lettieri
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luigi Leonardi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Amanda Bienz

  2. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Michèle Weiland

  3. Université Paris-Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, France

    Marc Baboulin

  4. CERFACS, Toulouse, France

    Carola Kruse

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Storniolo, F., Leonardi, L., Lettieri, G. (2023). Improving Live Migration Efficiency in QEMU: A Paravirtualized Approach. In: Bienz, A., Weiland, M., Baboulin, M., Kruse, C. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40843-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40843-4_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-40842-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-40843-4

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