一种新的Hypervisor逻辑域通道设计

A New Design of the Hypervisor Logical Domain Channel

UltraSparc T1/T2处理器采用硬件辅助的虚拟化技术,其平台固件Hypervisor实现了虚拟机管理的主要功能。逻辑域通道(Logical Domain Channel)是Hypervisor实现的支持虚拟机间以及虚拟机与Hypervisor间通信的一种机制,其实现简单,但缺乏足够的灵活性。同时,基于逻辑域通道的数据传输需要对传输数据进行拷贝,极大地影响了数据传输性能。本文介绍了一种新的逻辑域通道技术,采用基于描述符的直接数据传递方法,数据经过逻辑域通道时不需要拷贝,其长度也不受逻辑域通道缓冲区大小的限制,实现了虚拟机间灵活高效的数据传递。

The UltraSparc T1/T2 processor provides virtualization support. Its platform firmware Hypervisor acts as the virtual machine manager. The logical domain channel is a software mechanism that supports the domain-to-domain and domain-to-hypervisor communication. The logical domain chan- nel is a simple implementation lacking flexibility. Besides,the communication based on the logical domain channel needs data copying so as to heavily decrease the performance of data transfer. This paper intro- duces a new technique of logical domain channel. It directly transfers data from one side to the other side based on data descriptors and needs no copying. On the other hand, the size of the transferred data will not be limited by the buffer size of the logical domain channel. The new technique implements a more flexible and quick data transfer between virtual machines.