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Power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for mobile virtualization systems

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Abstract

A virtualized system generally suffers from low I/O performance, mainly caused by its inherent abstraction overhead and frequent CPU transitions between the guest and hypervisor modes. The recent research of polling-based I/O virtualization partly solved the problem, but excessive polling trades intensive CPU usage for higher performance. This article presents a power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for a virtual machine, which allows us to use it even with a limited number of CPU cores in mobile or embedded systems. Our framework monitors system status, and dynamically switches the I/O process mode between the exit and polling modes, depending on the amounts of current I/O requests and CPU utilization. It also dynamically controls the polling interval to reduce redundant polling. The highly dynamic nature of our framework leads to improvements in I/O performance with lower CPU usage as well. Our experiments showed that our framework outperformed the existing exit-based mechanisms by 10.8 % higher I/O throughput, maintaining similar CPU usage by only 3.1 % increment. In comparison to the systems solely based on the polling mechanism, ours reduced the CPU usage roughly down to 10.0 % with no or negligible performance loss.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by ICT R&D program of MSIP/IITP [R0126-15-1065, (SW StarLab) Development of UX Platform Software for Supporting Concurrent Multi-users on Large Displays] and the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2016-H8501-16-1015) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion). Young Ik Eom is the corresponding author of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Software, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea

    Kihong Lee, DongWoo Lee, Sungkil Lee & Young Ik Eom

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  1. Kihong Lee
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  2. DongWoo Lee
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  3. Sungkil Lee
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Correspondence to Young Ik Eom.

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Lee, K., Lee, D., Lee, S. et al. Power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for mobile virtualization systems. J Supercomput 73, 1307–1321 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1810-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1810-z

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