KVM-Loongson: An Efficient Hypervisor on MIPS

Virtualization is one of the hot topics in operating systems. However, virtualization on MIPS servers remains stagnant after the first attempt was done in late 1990s. The previous solutions seem not to meet the needs of modern servers and many aspects of them can still be improved. This paper introduces KVM-Loongson, an efficient virtualization solution for MIPS based on KVM. Paravirtualization is adopted to improve the performance of CPU virtualization and the clock accuracy. It can also reduce the memory virtualization overheads which are caused by three factors existing in virtualization on MIPS. Our experience also reveals that hardware virtualization support for MIPS is still needed on the aspect of efficiency. The whole work is done on boards with Loongson-3A CPUs which are quad core processors based on MIPS64 ISA. Performance evaluations show that programs of SPEC CINT2000 on the virtual machine can achieve averaging 94% their performance on the native machine when running single virtual machine.