Abstract
The hypervisor, with its resource isolation, security guarantees, and ability to meet high real-time requirements, offers significant advantages in real-time scenarios. Furthermore, its communication capabilities play a crucial role in enabling collaborative computation tasks across different virtual machines. The Jailhouse hypervisor, known for its real-time capabilities and secure embedded platform, demonstrates outstanding performance in real-time scenarios. However, the inter-virtual machine (inter-VM) communication protocol based on Jailhouse is not yet mature, necessitating optimization to enhance its suitability for real-time communication scenarios. Firstly, the existing communication mechanism underwent reconstruction, involving the disabling of the one-shot interrupt mode and expanding the shared memory area. Secondly, an experimental platform was established on the Raspberry Pi-4B, configuring the real-time system and adopting the io_uring methods. Finally, experimental evaluations were conducted to assess the differences in communication delay, throughput, and data transmission delay before and after the communication protocol reconstruction. Additionally, the mitigating effect of the new communication mechanism on VMexit behavior was also evaluated. The experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced communication mechanism significantly reduces both the system call overhead and the number of VMexit compared to the native communication protocol (Inter-VM Shared Memory, IVSHMEM). Moreover, the throughput exhibits a notable improvement of approximately 200 MB/s.
J. Zhang and F. Li—These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that in Jailhouse, a virtual machine is commonly referred to as a “cell”. Therefore, the terms “inter-VM” and “inter-cell” are equivalent in meaning.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by Gansu Province Key Research and Development Plan - Industrial Project under Grant No. 22YF7GA004, Gansu Province Science and Technology Major Project - Industrial Project under Grant No. 22ZD6GA048, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. lzujbky-2022-kb12, lzujbky-2021-sp43, lzujbky-2020-sp02, lzujbky-2019-kb51 and lzujbky-2018-k12, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. U22A20261 and 61402210. Science and Technology Plan of Qinghai Province under Grant No.2020-GX-164, and Supercomputing Center of Lanzhou University. We appreciate co-author Mr. Jiaming Zhang’s hard work during his postgraduate for the contribution of this paper is inspired by his master thesis [30].
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Zhang, J. et al. (2024). The Optimization of IVSHMEM Based on Jailhouse. In: Li, C., Li, Z., Shen, L., Wu, F., Gong, X. (eds) Advanced Parallel Processing Technologies. APPT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14103. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7872-4_4
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