Xen Project Developer Summit

The development of low latency storage media such as modern Solid State Drives (SSD) brings new challenges to virtualisation platforms. For the first time, we are witnessing storage back ends which are so fast that the CPU time spent in processing data significantly impacts the delivered throughput. This is aggravated by CPU speeds remaining largely constant while storage solutions get faster by orders of magnitude. To meet user demands and fully exploit SSD performance under Xen, new technologies are necessary. This talk will discuss the Xen storage virtualisation data path when using various back ends (e.g. blkback, tapdisk, qemu). It will explain why it is hard to exploit SSD performance with current technologies and present measurement data for a variety of workloads. Finally, it will show how techniques such as persistent grants and indirect I/O can help to mitigate the problem.