Dynamic Information Virtualization With Unified Cache Coherency
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing information virtualization technologies face challenges in efficiently managing coherency and security of non-addressable and addressable information, leading to performance bottlenecks and data isolation issues in multi-tenant environments.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a dynamic optimization manager (DOM) and process and memory manager (PMM) to facilitate coherent access to information from storage and network resources, ensuring secure and isolated access through unified caching and process-level virtualization.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional hardware abstraction through virtual machines is used, then isolation among different virtual machines is enforced, but I/O performance deteriorates due to data copying across multiple hops and software rendering instead of hardware acceleration
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a hypervisor as an intermediary layer between the guest operating systems and physical hardware. The hypervisor enables direct hardware access for graphics devices while maintaining isolation through virtualization. Specifically, the hypervisor allows the first guest OS to access the physical graphics device directly for 3D rendering, while the second guest OS can still access virtualized graphics resources, thus resolving the performance-isolation tradeoff
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the graphics device access into different pathways: one pathway allows direct physical hardware access for performance-critical operations in the first guest OS, while another pathway provides virtualized access for the second guest OS. This segmentation enables different virtual machines to use different access methods appropriate to their needs, achieving both high performance and isolation
2Productivity
If information is cached to achieve good performance, then access speed improves, but coherency management complexity increases due to need for locking and invalidation protocols
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements different caching strategies for different types of information and different guest operating systems. The hypervisor can configure which guest OS has direct access to cached data in memory and which guest OS requires protocol-based access. This local quality approach allows performance optimization for specific workloads while maintaining coherency for others, reducing overall management complexity
Data Source
AI summary
A system and method for providing dynamic information virtualization (DIV) is disclosed. According to one embodiment, a device includes a dynamic optimization manager (DOM), a process and memory manager (PMM), a memory, and a host device driver. The device starts virtual functions after booting to allow a virtual machine (VM) running a guest operating system to identify the virtual functions and load virtual drivers of the virtual functions. The PMM allocates a unified cache from the memory to facilitate coherent access to information from storage and network resources by the VM. The host device driver enables a guess process in the VM to access the information stored in the unified cache in a secure and isolated manner.