Proposals

Linux performance enhancements when running as a Xen HVM guest.

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One Line Summary

Expand Xen PV frontend drivers in Linux to work under HVM.

Abstract

Intel and AMD are both providing excellent hardware support for nested paging and Xen HVM guests take advantage of it.
Patches to enhance Linux performance when running as an HVM guest exist and are being submitted upstream: they make existing Xen PV frontend drivers work under HVM and extend the Xen PV interfaces to remove few key HVM performance bottlenecks.
Further enhancements are on the way and involve remapping irqs and MSIs into event channels to avoid reads and writes to the emulated lapic.
Are we using the right interfaces? Are we doing everything right to get these patches accepted?

Tags

Linux, Xen

Speaker

  • Biography

    Stefano Stabellini is a Xen engineer at Citrix on the Open Source platform team.
    He has been working on Xen since 2007, mainly focusing on Qemu, stubdomains, pci passthrough and more recently libxenlight and PV on HVM.
    Before joining Citrix he was a researcher at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, working on mobile ad hoc networks.

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