Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins) wrote:
Define "high performance hypervisor"... Would "within a
few percent of native" qualify? Xen/ia64 admittedly hasn't
gone through a wide range of performance tests but
domain0* currently compiles linux at only 4% slower than
native and I expect this to get closer to 2% with some more
work (and without additional changes to the patch). A domU*
guest will be slower due to I/O overhead but I/O is already
using higher level primitives (the same ones as x86).
That's certainly impressive! SMP, more I/O intensive workloads and domU
would be interesting as well.
I think xenlinux/ia64 is assuming that the memory allocated to dom0 is
machine contiguous. This is not supported by the balloon driver and the
netfront driver in drivers/xen. They change the guest physical ->
machine physical mapping for dom0 at runtime.
Dealing with the non-contiguity might impose some I/O performance
overheads, but that's orthogonal to the "is the instruction level
approach sufficient?" or "is it a good first step?" debate.
All I'm saying is that if there is a divergence on this question from
x86, sharing common driver code might become an issue.
-Arun
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