Geiger: monitoring the buffer cache in a virtual machine environment

Virtualization is increasingly being used to address server management and administration issues like flexible resource allocation, service isolation and workload migration. In a virtualized environment, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) is the primary resource manager and is an attractive target for implementing system features like scheduling, caching, and monitoring. However, the lack of runtime information within the VMM about guest operating systems, sometimes called the semantic gap, is a significant obstacle to efficiently implementing some kinds of services. In this paper we explore techniques that can be used by a VMM to passively infer useful information about a guest operating system’s unified buffer cache and virtual memory system. We have created a prototype implementation of these techniques inside the Xen VMM called Geiger and show that it can accurately infer when pages are inserted into and evicted from a system’s buffer cache. We explore several nuances invol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Stephen T. Jones, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2006, Guest Operating System, Operating System, Programming Languages, Vmm Called Geiger