PERFECT-XEN: A FRAMEWORK FOR PERFORMANCE COUNTER VIRTUALIZATION

Abstract: Virtualization is a powerful technique used for variety of application domains, including merging cloud environments that provide access to virtual machines as a service. This paper discusses the challenges of performance monitoring inherent to virtualized environments and introduces a technique to virtualize access to low-level performance counters on a per-thread basis. The technique was implemented in perfctr-xen, a framework for the Xen hypervisor that provides an infrastructure for higher-level profilers. This framework supports both accumulative event counts and interrupt-driven event sampling .Paper presents experimental results based on micro benchmarks and SPEC CPU2006 macro benchmarks that show the accuracy and usability of the obtained measurements when compared to native execution.

Keywords: Virtualization, Framework, Hypervisor, Virtual Machine.