A Dynamic Cache Partitioning Mechanism under Virtualization Environment

Cache sharing among multiple computing units on chip is common in today´s multi-core processors, and a lot of research has focused on the effective management of shared cache. A software management method called page coloring is commonly used to divide the cache among different applications competing for the same cache entries. Both static and dynamic cache partition mechanism have been implemented in operating system or user-space level. However, few efforts have been made under virtualization environments. Our previous work has provided a static cache partition method based on page coloring in Xen, following that, a dynamic cache partition mechanism called Colored Page Migration (CoPaM) is presented in this paper.