Providing notification to speculatively waking up target virtual machine for an I/O event using multiple virtual machines and processors

摘要

A computer system having a plurality of processor cores utilizes a device driver running in a driver virtual machine to handle I/O with the corresponding device for other virtual machines. A hypervisor in the computer system receives an interrupt from the corresponding device and identifies a virtual machine that best correlates to the received interrupt prior to forwarding the interrupt for handling by the driver virtual machine. The hypervisor then speculatively transmits a notification to the identified virtual machine to wake up and poll a memory shared between the identified virtual machine and the driver virtual machine. Once the driver virtual machine completes handling of the forwarded interrupt, it copies data made available by the corresponding device to the shared memory for access by the polling identified virtual machine.