vTurbo: Accelerating Virtual Machine I/O Processing Using Designated Turbo-Sliced Core

In a virtual machine (VM) consolidation environment, it has been observed that CPU sharing among multiple VMs will lead to I/O processing latency because of the CPU access latency experienced by each VM. In this paper, we present vTurbo, a system that accelerates I/O processing for VMs by offloading I/O processing to a designated core. More specifically, the designated core—called turbo core—runs with a much smaller time slice (e.g., 0.1ms) than the cores shared by production VMs. Most of the I/O IRQs for the production VMs will be delegated to the turbo core for more timely processing, hence accelerating the I/O processing for the production VMs. Our experiments show that vTurbo significantly improves the VMs’ network and disk I/O throughput, which consequently translates into application-level performance improvement.