A Fast RPC System for Virtual Machines

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 24; no. 7; pp. 1267 - 1276
• Main Authors: Chen, Hao, Shi, Lin, Sun, Jianhua, Li, Kenli, He, Ligang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.07.2013; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmarks; Indexes; interdomain communication; Kernel; Optimization; Performance degradation; Protocols; Remote procedure call (RPC); Remote procedure calls; Reproduction; Security; Servers; shared memory; Stacks; Virtual environments; virtual machine; Virtual machine monitors; Virtual machining; Weight reduction
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2012.199

Despite the advances in high performance interdomain communications for virtual machines (VM), data intensive applications developed for VMs based on the traditional remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism still suffer from performance degradation due to the inherent inefficiency of data serialization/deserilization operations. This paper presents VMRPC, a lightweight RPC framework specifically designed for VMs that leverages the heap and stack sharing mechanism to circumvent unnecessary data copy and serialization/deserilization. Our evaluation shows that the performance of VMRPC is an order of magnitude better than traditional RPC systems and existing alternative interdomain communication optimization systems. The evaluation on a VMRPC-enhanced networked file system across a varied range of benchmarks further reveals the competitiveness of VMRPC in IO-intensive applications.