On the Measurement of Performance Metrics for Virtualization-Enhanced Architectures
Swapneel C. Mhatre, Priya Chandran · 2023
Cloud computing facilitates resource sharing among multiple users. Although sharing leads to the effective utilization of resources, it raises many security concerns. Hence, virtualization-enabled processors, which are used in cloud computing, are enhanced to provide security. This has put a pressing demand for the measurement of performance metrics for virtualization-enhanced architectures. However, this is a challenging task. Most of the existing simulators do not simulate security-related enhancements in virtualzation-enhanced architectures. Also, software-based simulators are slow. This paper proposes an approach for hardware-based simulation of security-related enhancements in virtualization-enhanced architectures. This is illustrated through the simulation of rollback-sensitive memory architecture like Extended-HyperWall. The results demonstrate that Extended-HyperWall introduces only one extra memory access per memory read/write by the hypervisor or direct memory access controller. Also, it incurs only three additional memory accesses per page during checkpointing and rollback. The paper concludes that virtualization-enabled processors can be efficiently simulated in hardware.