Fast Domain Switching In Embedded Virtualization System

Nowadays with the rapid development of the Cloud Computing and hardwaretechnology, embedded devices become more important and popular. In order to haveleading positions in market, the major vendors release their own operating systemindependently, causing significant compatibility problems. To resolve such a problem, wehave to use virtualization technology to improve the utilization ratio of the embeddeddevices. Yet virtualization may induce bad performance and poor user experience,especially in domain switching.Fast domain switching technology reduces the consuming-time of domain switchingand improves the performance. It mainly improves two new virtualization models and onescheduling algorithm, which are privilege virtualization model, graphic card virtualizationmodel and domain scheduling algorithm. Fast domain switching technology also improvesthe start-up procedure of the guest operating system and the memory allocation scheme.The privilege virtualization model reduces a majority of no need hypervisor-calls andensures the guest operating system can run smoothly. For optimal performance of thegraphic card, we propose the new graphic card virtualization model, it reduces theperformance degradation greatly. The improved start-up procedure and. memory allocationscheme speed up the boot process and the memory access. To prove its efficiency, we alsorelease it in a prototype system, namely VNeo, which supports Android and ARM Linuxrunning on the simulate hard-ware based on ARM architecture with QEMU.Experimental results show that after using fast domain switching technology, domainswitching can finish in400milliseconds, which is half of before using this technology, andI/O performance degradation of guest operating systems is also greatly reduced, which ishalf of before using this technology.