Abstract
Title:
High-performance microkernels and virtualisation on ARM and segmented architecturesAuthors:
Carl van Schaik and Gernot Heiser School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 Australia
National ICT Australia, Sydney,
Australia
Abstract:
There's been a lot of hoohah recently about adding virtualisation interfaces to Linux. That something needs to be done is agreed... but what?
The Xen port to IA64 needs around 2000 changed or new lines of code. Is that all necessary? Probably not. We (UNSW and the University of Kahlsruhe) have been working together on a technique known as `afterburning' which drastically reduces the engineering effort involved in paravirtualising Linux (or FreeBSD, or any other open-source OS). For example, using this technique leads to around 20 lines of changed code, and 100 lines of new code to provide a paravirtualised Linux for Itanium that outperforms the manually paravirtualised Xen for some benchmarks.
We used the same technique to use Linux itself as a hypervisor. This talk will explain some of the performance hacks necessary to make this work.