Measuring CPU Overhead for I/O Processing
in the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

Ludmila Cherkasova

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA

lucy.cherkasova@hp.com

Rob Gardner

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

3404 E Harmony Rd., Fort Collins, CO 80528, USA

rob.gardner@hp.com

Abstract. Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) are gaining popularity in enterprise environments as a software-based solution for building shared hardware infrastructures via virtualization. In this work, using the Xen VMM, we present a light weight monitoring system for measuring the CPU usage of different virtual machines including the CPU overhead in the device driver domain caused by I/O processing on behalf of a particular virtual machine. Our performance study attempts to quantify and analyze this overhead for a set of I/O intensive workloads.

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference,
April 10–15, 2005, Anaheim, CA, USA
Last changed: 2 Mar. 2005 aw

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Measuring CPU Overhead for I/O Processing in the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

Measuring CPU Overhead for I/O Processing
in the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor