Inter-domain socket communications supporting high performance and full binary compatibility on Xen
Kangho Kim, Chei-Yol Kim, Sung‐In Jung, Hyun-Sup Shin, Jin‐Soo Kim · 2008
Communication performance between two processes in their own domains on the same physical machine gets improved but it does not reach our expectation. This paper presents the design and implementation of high-performance inter-domain communication mechanism, called XWAY, that maintains binary compatibility for applications written in standard socket interface. As a result of our survey, we found that three overheads mainly contribute to the poor performance; those are TCP/IP processing cost in each domain, page flipping overhead, and long communication path between both sides of a socket. XWAY achieves high performance by bypassing TCP/IP stacks, avoiding page flipping overhead, and providing a direct, accelerated communication path between domains in the same machine. Moreover, we introduce the XWAY socket architecture to support full binary compatibility with as little effort as possible.