ELI: bare-metal performance for I/O virtualization

Direct device assignment enhances the performance of guest virtual machines by allowing them to communicate with I/O devices without host involvement. But even with device assignment, guests are still unable to approach bare-metal performance, because the host intercepts all interrupts, including those interrupts generated by assigned devices to signal to guests the completion of their I/O requests. The host involvement induces multiple unwarranted guest/host context switches, which significantly hamper the performance of I/O intensive workloads. To solve this problem, we present ELI (ExitLess Interrupts), a software-only approach for handling interrupts within guest virtual machines directly and securely. By removing the host from the interrupt handling path, ELI manages to improve

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Abel Gordon, Nadav Amit, Nadav Har'El, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Alex Landau, Assaf Schuster, Dan Tsafrir
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2012, Context Switches, Metal Performance, Programming Languages, Virtual Machines