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Optimizing guest swapping using elastic and transparent memory provisioning on virtualization platform

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Abstract

On virtualization platforms, peak memory demand caused by hotspot applications often triggers page swapping in guest OS, causing performance degradation inside and outside of this virtual machine (VM). Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between virtual machine monitor (VMM) and guest operating system (OS). Our work aims at utilizing the free memory scattered in multiple hosts in a virtualization environment to improve the performance of guest swapping in a transparent and implicit way. Based on the insightful analysis of behavioral characteristics of guest swapping, we design and implement a distributed and scalable framework HybridSwap. It dynamically constructs virtual swap pools using various policies, and builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which can adaptively choose different virtual swap pools.We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with some benchmarks in different scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed and shows a double performance promotion in some cases. Even in the worst case, the system overhead brought by HybridSwap is acceptable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Xi Li

  2. National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410008, China

    Xi Li, Pengfei Zhang, Rui Chu & Huaimin Wang

Authors
  1. Xi Li
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  2. Pengfei Zhang
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  3. Rui Chu
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  4. Huaimin Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pengfei Zhang.

Additional information

Xi Li received BS and PhD degrees in Central South University, China in 2002 and 2011, respectively. She was a visiting student in Computation Institute of University of Chicago, USA during 2007–2008. She is currently a lecturer in School of Information Science and Engineering of Central South University, and doing post-doctoral research in the National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology, China. Her research interests include distributed and parallel processing, grid computing, cloud computing, and operating systems.

Pengfei Zhang received the BS and MS degrees in computer science from the National University of Defense Technology, China, in 2011 and 2013, respectively. He is currently an PhD candidate in the National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology. His research interests include cloud computing, virtualization, operating systems and cloud-based robotics. He is a student member of IEEE.

Rui Chu received the BS and PhD degrees in computer science from the National University of Defense Technology, China, in 2001 and 2008, respectively. He was a visiting student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China in 2007. He is currently an assistant professor in the National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology. His research interests include cloud computing, wireless sensor networks, virtualization and operating systems.

Huaimin Wang received the PhD degree in computer science from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 1992. He is currently a professor and the chief engineer in department of educational affairs, NUDT. He has been awarded the Chang Jiang Scholars by Ministry of Education of China, and the Distinct Young Scholar by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and so on. He has worked as the director of several grand research projects and has published more than 100 research papers in international conferences and journals. His current research interests include middleware, software agent, trust-worthy computing. He is a member of the IEEE.

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Li, X., Zhang, P., Chu, R. et al. Optimizing guest swapping using elastic and transparent memory provisioning on virtualization platform. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 908–924 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5217-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5217-z

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