Study of Content-Based Sharing on the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

Selvamuthukumar Senthilvelan and Murugappan Senthilvelan

Abstract: Renewed interest in Virtual Machines (VM) due to inexpensive hardware has triggered numerous application areas such as server consolidation and management, testing and debugging of system software, rapid application deployment, data isolation, etc. It has been observed that there is a potential to save system memory by cutting down on redundant copies of code and data existing across multiple VMs running on top of a single physical machine. This paper investigates a transparent memory sharing mechanism called Content-Based sharing on the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor. The memory virtualization and the input/output (IO) mechanisms of Xen have been studied in detail and discussed. The mechanism to identify memory pages that can be shared has been implemented and studied. Preliminary results indicate a good potential to share memory pages across domains running similar guest OSes.

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Presentation available as: PPS

Instructions to build the source:
  1. Click here to download Xen 2.05 source files.
  2. After installation replace the file blkback.c in linux-2.6.10-xen-sparse/drivers/xen/blkback/ with the modified blkback.c provided.
  3. Rebuild using the command: make install-kernels