Virtual Snooping: Filtering Snoops in Virtualized Multi-cores

Virtualization has been rapidly expanding its applications in numerous server and desktop environments to improve the utilization and manageability of physical systems. Such proliferation of virtualized systems opens a new opportunity to improve the scalability of future multi-core architectures. Among the scalability bottlenecks in multi-cores, cache coherence has been a critical problem. Although snoopbased protocols have been dominating commercial multi-core designs, it has been difficult to scale them for more cores, as snooping protocols require high network bandwidth and power consumption for snooping all the caches. In this paper, we propose a novel snoop-based cache coherence protocol, called virtual snooping, for virtualized multi-core architectures. Virtual snooping exploits memory isolation across virtual machines and prevents unnecessary snoop requests from crossing the virtual machine boundaries. Each virtual machine becomes a virtual snoop domain, consisting of a subset o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Daehoon Kim, Hwanju Kim, Jaehyuk Huh
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2010, Real Virtualized Systems, Virtual Machines, Virtualized Systems