research-article

On making xen detect hypercalls and memory accesses for simulating virtualization-enabled processors

Authors:

Swapneel C. Mhatre,

Priya ChandranAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 154 - 161

https://doi.org/10.1145/3341105.3373975

Published: 30 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Due to the widespread use of cloud-based systems that are shared by multiple users, new processors are enhanced for security in virtualization. However, it is a challenging task to develop simulators for such processors, mainly, due to the lack of relevant information at the application level for computing performance parameters. This paper proposes a methodology to extract the required information from the hypervisor and transfer it to the hardware-based simulator for simulation of such processors. The paper proposes an approach to detect hypercalls made by the guest operating system during the execution of the guest application program on Xen hypervisor. This paper considers five hypercalls, viz., mmu_update, memory_op, update_va_mapping, grant_table_op and mmuext_op. The results show that for the guest application executed, among these five hypercalls, mmu_update is called the maximum number of times, while memory_op is called the minimum number of times. The paper also proposes an approach to signal the memory accesses by Xen on the communications (COM) port. This signal is observed on the cathode ray oscilloscope (CRO) and may be utilized for simulation. This research is valuable as it concludes that virtualization-enabled processors may be effectively simulated by extracting the required information from the hypervisor.

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Cited By

Mhatre SChandran P(2024)On the simulation of hypervisor instructions for accurate timing simulation of virtualized systemsInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-024-01862-6Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-024-01862-6
Mhatre SChandran PHong JLanperne MPark JCerny TShahriar H(2023)On the Measurement of Performance Metrics for Virtualization-Enhanced ArchitecturesProceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3555776.3577705(49-56)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555776.3577705

Index Terms

On making xen detect hypercalls and memory accesses for simulating virtualization-enabled processors
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Modeling and simulation

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cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2020

2348 pages

ISBN:9781450368667

DOI:10.1145/3341105

Conference Chairs:
Chih-Cheng Hung
Kennesaw State University
,
Tomas Cerny
Baylor University
,
Program Chairs:
Dongwan Shin
New Mexico Tech
,
Alessio Bechini
University of Pisa, Italy

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

© 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Published: 30 March 2020

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SAC '20: The 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 30 - April 3, 2020

Brno, Czech Republic

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Cited By

Mhatre SChandran P(2024)On the simulation of hypervisor instructions for accurate timing simulation of virtualized systemsInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-024-01862-6Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-024-01862-6
Mhatre SChandran PHong JLanperne MPark JCerny TShahriar H(2023)On the Measurement of Performance Metrics for Virtualization-Enhanced ArchitecturesProceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3555776.3577705(49-56)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555776.3577705

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