A survey of direct interrupt delivery techniques in I/O virtualization

摘要

Input/Output (I/O) virtualization has become the determinant of system performance. In I/O virtualization environment, the performance overhead associated with the data path becomes largely negligible with the help of the direct memory access (DMA). Directly delivering interrupt into their target VM can significantly minimize the I/O virtualization performance overhead and has become a hot topic in both academic and industry research areas. This paper studies the existing direct interrupt delivery mechanisms and provides a comprehensive survey of interrupt processing mechanism in I/O virtualization. Our primary attention is to propose a research overview to reflect the state-of-the-art direct interrupt delivery issues and also provide critical guidance on the design of next-generation I/O virtualization framework.