CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Operating System Support

for Virtual Machines
Coauthored by Samuel T. King, George W. Dunlap and Peter M. Chen
In Proceedings of the 2003 USENIX Technical Conference

Presented by Ken C.K. Lee

(email: cklee@cse.psu.edu)
Jan 23, 2006

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Outline

Introduction
Review of Virtual Machines
UMLinux an evaluated Type II VMMs
Host OS Support for Type II VMMs
Performance Results
Conclusions

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Introduction
About Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM)
A layer of software emulating hardware of a complete
computer system.
Provide an abstraction virtual machine (VM).
Could provide a VM identical to underlying hardware platform
running VMM or totally different hardware platform.

Uses of VMMs
To create illusion of multiple machines on a single physical
machines.
To provide software environment for OS debugging.
To provide means of isolation that untrusted applications run
separately.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Introduction
Two types of VMMs
Type I

Type II

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Virtual Machines
The classification of VMMs can be based on whether
the VM created by a VMM emulates the same
underlying hardware.
VMs emulating the underlying hardware (homogeneous)
Some performance problems due to enumeration overheads,
additional complexity in term of frequent task switches and
memory mapping.

VMs emulating different hardware (heterogeneous)

Various degree of compatibility:
Denali supports only some instructions.
Microkernel provides high-level services that are not provided by
hardware.
Java VM is completely hardware independent.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Virtual Machines
Another classification based on Type I/II VMMs
This paper focuses on homogeneous Type II VMMs:
Pros:
Run as a process that system developers/administrators can
have an easier control on it.
As a debugging platform

Cons:
Undesirable performance due to lack of sufficiently powerful
interfaces provided by underlying operating systems.
Thats work to be presented in this paper.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

UMLinux
What is UMLinux?
UMLinux is a Type II VMM , a case Type II VMM studied in
this paper
It runs upon Linux and the guest operating systems and
guest applications run as a single process.
Note: The interfaces provided by UMLinux is similar but not
identical to underlying hardware, so modifications on both
guest OS and VMM are needed.
It makes use of functionality supplied by underlying OS, e.g.

process as CPU,
Host memory mapping and protection as virtual MMU
Memory files as file systems etc.
files and devices as virtual devices,
TUN/TAP devices as virtual network,
host signal as virtual interrupts,

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

UMLinux
UMLinux system structure
A VMM process and a guest-machine process

VMM process
Redirects operating signal and system calls
Restricts the set of system calls allowed by guest OS
VMM uses ptrace to mediate access between guest
andto host
OS.
*machine
ptrace isprocess
a system call
observe
and control another process, and examine
and change its core image and registers. It is primarily used to implement
breakpoint debugging and system call tracing.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

UMLinux
UMLinux operations
Example:
System call intercepted by VMM
process via ptrace
guest SIGUSR1 handler calls mmap
to access guest kernel data;
intercepted by VMM process

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Three bottlenecks in running a Type II VMM
Inordinate number of context switches between processes.
A large number of memory protection operations.
A large number of memory mapping operations.
This paper proposed possible modifications to VMM and in
general, the modifications involves only a few number of lines
of code.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Dealing with extra host
context (process) switches
Causes:
Using ptrace between VMM and
host OS to intercept all requests.

Solution:
Moving VMM processs
functionality into host kernel.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Dealing with a large number of
memory protection operations
Causes:
When the guest machine process
switches between guest kernel mode
to guest user mode, the access mode
of guest kernels portion address
space must be changed
appropriately.
The access mode alternation is
invoked by making host system calls
mmap, munmap and mprotect
that incur significant overhead.
Memory map of UMLinux

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Dealing with a large number of memory
protection operations (Contd)
2 Solutions:
Solution 1: By adjusting the bound on the
user code and data segments rather than
granting entire address space.
Drawbacks:
Limited use of actual and available memory
address space.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Dealing with a large number of memory
protection operations (Contd)
2 Solutions:
Solution 2: By using the page tables
supervisor-only bit to distinguish between
guest kernel mode and guest user mode.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Host OS support for Type II VMMs

Dealing with a large number of memory mapping
operations
Causes:
Switching of multiple guest applications.
Changing the current memory mapping between guest virtual
pages and the page in virtual machines physical memory file.
System calls mmap and munmap are invoked.

Solutions:
UMLinux defers the system call til it is needed but it does not
reduce mmap and munmap calls.
Modification of OS (i.e. switchguest) to support multiple several
address space definitions.
The system call switchguest is pretty fast since it need to
change the pointer rather than manipulating the actual memory.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Performance Results
Objectives:

Measuring the 3 proposals for identified bottlenecks.

Experiment setup:

Performance metrics:

A null system call

Switching between two concurrent guest application processes
(64KB each)
(Time of) Transferring 10MB of data using TCP across 100Mb/s
Ethernet switch.

Three benchmarks:
POV-Ray
Kernel-build
SPECweb99

AMD Athlon 1800+ CPU, 256MB Memory and Linux kernel

2.4.18 ported to UMLinux.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Performance Results
Results
The effect are cumulated among all proposed schemes.
Significant improvement by
reducing context switches

Standalone must
be the best

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Performance Results
Results (Contd)
Significant improvement by
reducing context switches

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Performance Results
Results
CPU intensive tasks

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Performance Results
Results (Contd)

Conclusion from the result:

The improvement made according
to the proposal is shown
effective.

CSE598C Virtual Machines and Their Applications

Summary
Three performance bottlenecks of Type II VMM (i.e.,
UMLinux) are identified, namely,
A number of context switches between host processes
A number of memory protection operations
A number of memory operations

Corresponding to these bottlenecks, improvements

are made in terms of structural change of VMM and
exploring alternatives to some expensive system calls.
Performance results prove the claims of the proposal.