Performance analysis of virtual machines through tracing

This paper presents extensions to the Linux trace toolkit (LTT) for efficiently tracing complete systems, from the user level to the virtual machine system level and the Xen hypervisor layer. An automated benchmark was created to measure the overhead imposed by tracing and Xen paravirtualization, comparing the performance of systems, with and without virtualization and tracing. The results show a negligible impact caused by tracing and a reasonable overhead caused by paravirtualization. For some I/O intensive applications, the overhead imposed by paravirtualization is less negligible.