Summary: Geiger: Monitoring the Buffer Cache
in a Virtual Machine Environment
Stephen T. Jones Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin­Madison
{stjones, dusseau, remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
Abstract
Virtualization is increasingly being used to address server man-
agement and administration issues like flexible resource allocation,
service isolation and workload migration. In a virtualized environ-
ment, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) is the primary resource
manager and is an attractive target for implementing system fea-
tures like scheduling, caching, and monitoring. However, the lack
of runtime information within the VMM about guest operating sys-
tems, sometimes called the semantic gap, is a significant obstacle
to efficiently implementing some kinds of services.
In this paper we explore techniques that can be used by a
VMM to passively infer useful information about a guest operating
system's unified buffer cache and virtual memory system. We have
created a prototype implementation of these techniques inside the
Xen VMM called Geiger and show that it can accurately infer when

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Liblit, Ben - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences