Scale, Performance, and Simplicity and the Denali Virtual Architecture

The virtual architecture exposed by Denali was designed to enhance scalability, performance, and simplicity. In this section, we provide quantitative evidence to back these claims. Specifically, we demonstrate that batched asynchronous interrupts have performance and scalability benefits, that Denali's idle-with-timeout instruction is crucial for scalability, that Denali's simplified virtual NIC has performance advantages over an emulated real NIC, and that the source code complexity of Denali is substantially less than that of even a minimal Linux kernel.