Page coloring synchronization for improving cache performance in virtualization environment

Abstract

The paging scheme randomly translates the virtual address into the physical address. Thus, it can lead to some serious problems like performance non-determinism and poor cache performance. In order to resolve these problems, page coloring is applied to operating systems such as Solaris, FreeBSD, and Windows. However, there is a problem applying page coloring in virtualization environment. The paging scheme translates the virtual address of the guest into the physical address of the guest which is not the real physical address. In this paper, we introduce a technique that can be used for synchronizing the page color between guest virtual machine (VM) and host machine. We name this technique page coloring synchronization. Our technique has some advantages such as reducing performance non-determinism and improving cache performance in virtualization environment. Our experiments demonstrate that if our technique is applied to the virtual machine monitor (VMM), it improves the performance up to 6.3%. Also, our experiments show that our technique can reduce performance non-determinism. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.