A Tracing Approach to Process Migration for Virtual Machine Based on Multicore Platform

Abstract

Recently, multicore processor and virtualization become popular in research and application. And an even newer tendency is to deploy virtualization on multicore processor platform. This means on a physical server, several isolated and high performance virtual environments are provided, and concurrent program has a chance to run in a multicore virtualized environment. But most virtual processor (VCPU) scheduler in VMM is not efficient in scheduling concurrent program with synchronization. And we have developed a VMM with a new VCPU scheduler to reduce the synchronization cost in some scenarios. As a component of this VMM, we need an approach to trace the processes migration in virtual machine and the mapping relationship between VCPUs and cores of physical processor to verify whether the new scheduler is effective and consistent with our initial idea. In this paper, we present such an approach and a demo Process Migration Tracing Engine for monitoring the migration of process on VCPU(s) and VCPU(s) on the cores of physical processor based on Linux 2.6 and Xen 3.2. We evaluate the impact of the engine on system performance and the results shows that this tracing approach and the tracing engine are effective and efficient.