Testing Performance-Isolation in Multi-core Systems

In this paper we present a methodology to be used for quantifying the level of performance isolation for a multi-core system. We have devised a test that can be applied to breaches of isolation in different computing resources that may be shared between different cores. We use this test to determine the level of isolation gained by using the Jailhouse hypervisor compared to a regular Linux system in terms of CPU isolation, cache isolation and memory bus isolation. Our measurements show that the Jailhouse hypervisor provides performance isolation of local computing resources such as CPU. We have also evaluated if any isolation could be gained for shared computing resources such as the system wide cache and the memory bus controller. Our tests show no measurable difference in partitioning between a regular Linux system and a Jailhouse partitioned system for shared resources. Using the Jailhouse hypervisor provides only a small noticeable overhead when executing multiple shared-resource intensive tasks on multiple cores, which implies that running Jailhouse in a memory saturated system will not be harmful. However, contention still exist in the memory bus and in the system-wide cache.