Measuring and Optimizing the Performance of the Android Virtualization Framework
H. C. Wei, Leng-Kai Lin, Chun-Yen Lin, Shih-Wei Li · 2024
Google recently released the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) to support confidential computing for mobile devices. This work evaluated the performance of the Android AVF for the first time on Google Pixel devices. Our results show that pVMs exhibited significant performance overhead in I/O intensive workloads. We identified the overhead that stems from device drivers in the protected VMs performing bounce buffering. We thus extended Linux to optimize memory allocation and reduce lock contention to effectively improve the performance of pVMs by 20% in the best case compared to the baseline.