research-article

Performance profiling of virtual machines

Authors:

Nipun Sehrawat,

Willy ZwaenepoelAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 46, Issue 7

Pages 3 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/2007477.1952686

Published: 09 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Profilers based on hardware performance counters are indispensable for performance debugging of complex software systems. All modern processors feature hardware performance counters, but current virtual machine monitors (VMMs) do not properly expose them to the guest operating systems. Existing profiling tools require privileged access to the VMM to profile the guest and are only available for VMMs based on paravirtualization. Diagnosing performance problems of software running in a virtualized environment is therefore quite difficult.

This paper describes how to extend VMMs to support performance profiling. We present two types of profiling in a virtualized environment: guest-wide profiling and system-wide profiling. Guest-wide profiling shows the runtime behavior of a guest. The profiler runs in the guest and does not require privileged access to the VMM. System-wide profiling exposes the runtime behavior of both the VMM and any number of guests. It requires profilers both in the VMM and in those guests.

Not every VMM has the right architecture to support both types of profiling. We determine the requirements for each of them, and explore the possibilities for their implementation in virtual machines using hardware assistance, paravirtualization, and binary translation.

We implement both guest-wide and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on the x86 hardware virtualization extensions and system-wide profiling for a VMM based on binary translation. We demonstrate that these profilers provide good accuracy with only limited overhead.

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Cited By

Weber MApel SSiegmund N(2021)White-Box Performance-Influence ModelsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099(1059-1071)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099
Albalawi AVassilakis VCalinescu R(2021)Memory Deduplication as a Protective Factor in Virtualized SystemsApplied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-81645-2_17(301-317)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81645-2_17
Liu PYang RSun JLiu X(2019)SysOptic: A Fine-Grained Monitoring System for Virtual Machines Based on PMU2019 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE)10.1109/SOSE.2019.00042(244-2446)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2019.00042
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Index Terms

Performance profiling of virtual machines
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 7

VEE '11

July 2011

231 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2007477

Issue’s Table of Contents

VEE '11: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
March 2011
250 pages
ISBN:9781450306874
DOI:10.1145/1952682
General Chair:
Erez Petrank
The Technion, Israel
,
Program Chair:
Doug Lea
SUNY Oswego, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 March 2011

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 46, Issue 7

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Cited By

Weber MApel SSiegmund N(2021)White-Box Performance-Influence ModelsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099(1059-1071)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099
Albalawi AVassilakis VCalinescu R(2021)Memory Deduplication as a Protective Factor in Virtualized SystemsApplied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-81645-2_17(301-317)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81645-2_17
Liu PYang RSun JLiu X(2019)SysOptic: A Fine-Grained Monitoring System for Virtual Machines Based on PMU2019 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE)10.1109/SOSE.2019.00042(244-2446)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2019.00042
Varasteh AGoudarzi M(2017)Server Consolidation Techniques in Virtualized Data Centers: A SurveyIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2015.245827311:2(772-783)Online publication date: Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSYST.2015.2458273
Beierle NKruse P(2016)Combining profiling and monitoring to analyze test coverage and identify performance problemsProceedings of the 9th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools10.4108/eai.14-12-2015.2262590(69-70)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4108/eai.14-12-2015.2262590
Wang XChai SIsnardi MLim SKarri R(2016)Hardware Performance Counter-Based Malware Identification and Detection with Adaptive Compressive SensingACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/285705513:1(1-23)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2016
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Taheri JZomaya AKassler A(2016)vmBBThrPred: A Black-Box Throughput Predictor for Virtual Machines in Cloud EnvironmentsService-Oriented and Cloud Computing10.1007/978-3-319-44482-6_2(18-33)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2016
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Calzarossa MDella Vedova MMassari LPetcu DTabash MTessera D(2016)Workloads in the CloudsPrinciples of Performance and Reliability Modeling and Evaluation10.1007/978-3-319-30599-8_20(525-550)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2016
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Bernabe JPerez GSkarmeta Gomez A(2015)Intercloud Trust and Security Decision Support SystemJournal of Grid Computing10.1007/s10723-015-9346-713:3(425-456)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
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Peternier AAnsaloni DBonetta DPautasso CBinder W(2014)Improving execution unit occupancy on SMT-based processors through hardware-aware thread schedulingFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2013.06.01530(229-241)Online publication date: Jan-2014
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