MyriXen: Message Passing in Xen VMs

• Cloud Computing is a significant trend, but is mainly used for consolidating service-oriented environments. • Bridging the gap between Virtualization techniques and High-Performance Network I/O. • HPC interconnects provide abstractions that can be exploited in VM execution environments but lack architectural support. Xen Architecture Xen PV network I/O: • based on a split driver model (netfront / netback): • exports a generic Ethernet API to kernelspace. • driver domain has direct access to hardware, and hosts • the hardware-specific driver, • the protocol-interface driver and • the netback driver • the netfront attaches to the netback driver, which in turn attaches to a dummy network interface bridged with the physical network interface in software. Privileged Guest from netfront netback driver event channel netif API xenbus API VM1 VM2 software bridge ethernet device driver Guest VM Application netfront driver Guest VM Applicatio