vINT: Hardware-Assisted Virtual Interrupt Remapping for SMP VM with Scheduling Awareness

Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) virtual machine (VM), or virtual SMP for short, enables a single virtual machine to span multiple processors, thereby supporting the virtual machine to run resource-intensive applications. In addition to offering higher computing capacity, virtual SMP also offers the opportunity to alleviate the problem of unpredictable I/O responsiveness. To this end, we propose vINT (scheduling status based virtual INterrupt remapping adapTer), a scheme that leverages hardware-assisted interrupt mapping. vINT obtains high efficiency and flexibility by adding a lightweight module in virtual machine monitor (VMM) with no need of changing VMM scheduler and is transparent to guest OS. We implement the prototype in XEN 4.3.0 and conduct evaluations with both micro-benchmarks and macro-benchmarks. The experimental results show that vINT can increase the networking throughput by 5x and can reduce the required execute time of disk I/O by 17.5%, while introducing only a light overhead.