In a virtual machine (VM) consolidation environment, it has been observed that CPU sharing among multiple VMs will lead to I/O processing latency because of the CPU access latency experienced by each VM. In this paper, we present vTurbo, a system that accelerates I/O processing for VMs by offloading I/O processing to a designated core. More specifically, the designated core - called turbo core - runs with a much smaller time slice (e.g., 0.1ms) than the cores shared by production VMs. Most of the I/O IRQs for the production VMs will be delegated to the turbo core for more timely processing, hence accelerating the I/O processing for the production VMs. Our experiments show that vTurbo significantly improves the VMs' network and disk I/O throughput, which consequently translates into application-level performance improvement.
['Cong Xu', 'Sahan Gamage', 'Hui Lu', 'Ramana Rao Kompella', 'Dongyan Xu']
vTurbo: accelerating virtual machine I/O processing using designated turbo-sliced core