research-article

Efficient virtualization on embedded power architecture® platforms

Authors:

Aashish Mittal,

Dushyant Bansal,

Varun SethiAuthors Info & Claims

ASPLOS '13: Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

Pages 445 - 458

https://doi.org/10.1145/2451116.2451163

Published: 16 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Power Architecture® processors are popular and widespread on embedded systems, and such platforms are increasingly being used to run virtual machines. While the Power Architecture meets the Popek-and-Goldberg virtualization requirements for traditional trap-and-emulate style virtualization, the performance overhead of virtualization remains high. For example, workloads exhibiting a large amount of kernel activity typically show 3-5x slowdowns over bare-metal.

Recent additions to the Linux kernel contain guest and host side paravirtual extensions for Power Architecture platforms. While these extensions improve performance significantly, they are guest-specific, guest-intrusive, and cover only a subset of all possible virtualization optimizations.

We present a set of host-side optimizations that achieve comparable performance to the aforementioned paravirtual extensions, on an unmodified guest. Our optimizations are based on adaptive in-place binary translation. Unlike the paravirtual approach, our solution is guest neutral. We implement our ideas in a prototype based on Qemu/KVM. After our modifications, KVM can boot an unmodified Linux guest around 2.5x faster. We contrast our optimization approach with previous similar binary translation based approaches for the x86 architecture; in our experience, each architecture presents a unique set of challenges and optimization opportunities.

References

[1]

QorIQ Qonverge BSC 9131 RDB for Femtocell base station development. http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=BSC9131RDB (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[2]

Freescale Semiconductor. Hardware and software assists in virtualization, Rev 0, Aug. 2009.

[3]

Freescale Semiconductor. Freescale's embedded hypervisor for QorIQTM. P4 Series Communications Platform, Rev 1, Oct. 2008.

[4]

K. Adams and O. Agesen. A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization. In ASPLOS '06.

Digital Library

[5]

O. Agesen, J. Mattson, R. Rugina, and J. Sheldon. Software techniques for avoiding hardware virtualization exits. In USENIX ATC '12.

Digital Library

[6]

V. Bala, E. Duesterwald, and S. Banerjia. Dynamo: a transparent dynamic optimization system. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 35 (5): 1--12, 2000.

Digital Library

[7]

S. Bansal and A. Aiken. Binary translation using peephole superoptimizers. In OSDI '08.

Digital Library

[8]

R. Bhargava, B. Serebrin, F. Spadini, and S. Manne. Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems. In ASPLOS '08.

Digital Library

[9]

D. Bruening. Efficient, Transparent and Comprehensive Runtime Code Manipulation. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

Digital Library

[10]

Unix benchmark suite()}unixbenchbyte-unixbench: A Unix benchmark suite. byte-unixbench: A Unix benchmark suite. http://code.google.com/p/byte-unixbench (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[11]

G. Heiser. The role of virtualization in embedded systems. 2008.

[12]

A. Klaiber. The technology behind Crusoe processors. Technical report, Transmeta Corp., January 2000. URL http://www.transmeta.com.

[13]

M PowerPC: About exit timing()}kvm_ppc_exittimingsKVM PowerPC: About exit timing. KVM PowerPC: About exit timing. http:///www.linux-kvm.org/page/PowerPC_Exittimings (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[14]

L. McVoy and C. Staelin. lmbench: portable tools for performance analysis. In USENIX ATC '96.

Digital Library

[15]

N. Nethercote and J. Seward. Valgrind: a framework for heavyweight dynamic binary instrumentation. SIGPLAN Not., 42 (6): 89--100, June 2007.

Digital Library

[16]

P1010 and P1014 low-power communication processors. P1010 and p1014 low-power communication processors. http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_sheet/QP1010FS.pdf (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[17]

P1023 Product Summary. P1023 product summary. http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=P1023 (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[18]

Paravirtual Extensions to Linux for Power Architecture Virtualization. Paravirtual extensions to Linux for Power Architecture virtualization. http://svn.dd-wrt.com/browser/src/linux/pb42/linux-3.2/Documentation/virtual/kvm/ppc-pv.txt?rev=18112 (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[19]

G. J. Popek and R. P. Goldberg. Formal requirements for virtualizable third generation architectures. Commun. ACM, 17 (7): 412--421, 1974. ISSN 0001-0782.

Digital Library

[20]

Power ISA Version 2.06 Revision B. Power ISA Version 2.06 Revision B. http://www.power.org/resources/downloads/PowerISA_V2.06_PUBLIC.pdf (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[21]

Qemu: open source processor emulator. Qemu: open source processor emulator. http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ (as on Jan 10, 2013).

[22]

S. Yoder. KVM on Embedded Power Architecture Platforms. http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/imagesc/c2/2011-forum-embedded-power.pdf (as on Jan 10, 2013).

Cited By

Jiang JDong RZhou ZSong CWang WYew PZhang W(2020)More with Less – Deriving More Translation Rules with Less Training Data for DBTs Using Parameterization2020 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO50266.2020.00043(415-426)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO50266.2020.00043
Song CWang WYew PZhai AZhang WDan TDahlia M(2019)Unleashing the power of learningProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358815(77-89)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358815
Zhang XGuo QChen YChen THu WOlukotun KSmith AHundt RMars J(2015)HERMESProceedings of the 13th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/2738600.2738631(246-256)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2738600.2738631
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Efficient virtualization on embedded power architecture® platforms
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance
2. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage

Recommendations

Efficient virtualization on embedded power architecture® platforms
ASPLOS '13

Power Architecture® processors are popular and widespread on embedded systems, and such platforms are increasingly being used to run virtual machines. While the Power Architecture meets the Popek-and-Goldberg virtualization requirements for traditional ...
Efficient virtualization on embedded power architecture® platforms
ASPLOS '13

Power Architecture® processors are popular and widespread on embedded systems, and such platforms are increasingly being used to run virtual machines. While the Power Architecture meets the Popek-and-Goldberg virtualization requirements for traditional ...
A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization
Proceedings of the 2006 ASPLOS Conference

Until recently, the x86 architecture has not permitted classical trap-and-emulate virtualization. Virtual Machine Monitors for x86, such as VMware ® Workstation and Virtual PC, have instead used binary translation of the guest kernel code. However, both ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASPLOS '13: Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

March 2013

574 pages

ISBN:9781450318709

DOI:10.1145/2451116

General Chair:
Vivek Sarkar
Rice University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Rastislav Bodik
University of California, Berkeley, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 48, Issue 4
ASPLOS '13
April 2013
540 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2499368
Issue’s Table of Contents
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 41, Issue 1
ASPLOS '13
March 2013
540 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/2490301
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 March 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ASPLOS '13

Sponsor:

ASPLOS '13: Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

March 16 - 20, 2013

Texas, Houston, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 535 of 2,713 submissions, 20%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
427
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 10 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Jiang JDong RZhou ZSong CWang WYew PZhang W(2020)More with Less – Deriving More Translation Rules with Less Training Data for DBTs Using Parameterization2020 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO50266.2020.00043(415-426)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO50266.2020.00043
Song CWang WYew PZhai AZhang WDan TDahlia M(2019)Unleashing the power of learningProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358815(77-89)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358815
Zhang XGuo QChen YChen THu WOlukotun KSmith AHundt RMars J(2015)HERMESProceedings of the 13th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/2738600.2738631(246-256)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2738600.2738631
Zhang XGuo QChen YChen THu W(2015)Hermes: A fast cross-ISA binary translator with post-optimization2015 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2015.7054204(246-256)Online publication date: Feb-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO.2015.7054204
Shuja JGani ABilal KKhan AMadani SKhan SZomaya A(2016)A Survey of Mobile Device VirtualizationACM Computing Surveys10.1145/289716449:1(1-36)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897164

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents