Logical Partitions on Many-Core Platforms Ramya Jayaram Masti, Claudio Marforio, Kari Kostiainen, Claudio Soriente, Srdjan Capkun Institute of Information Security, ETH Zurich fi
[email protected] ABSTRACT systems | a technique called hypervisor disengagement [39]. Cloud platforms that use logical partitions to allocate dedi- Other benefits of logical partitions include improved perfor- cated resources to VMs can benefit from small and therefore mance [15] and efficient nested virtualization [36]. secure hypervisors. Many-core platforms, with their abun- A many-core processor consists of a large number of sim- dant resources, are an attractive basis to create and deploy ple, energy-efficient cores integrated on a single processor logical partitions on a large scale. However, many-core plat- die. Due to their abundant resources, many-core platforms forms are designed for efficient cross-core data sharing rather may be used, in principle, for deploying systems that scale than isolation, which is a key requirement for logical parti- up to hundreds, or even thousands [7], of logical partitions. tions. Typically, logical partitions leverage hardware vir- However, the available many-core systems [7, 21, 22, 41] are tualization extensions that require complex CPU core en- designed for high-performance computing applications and hancements. These extensions are not optimal for many- allow data sharing across cores. Consequently, such many- core platforms, where it is preferable to keep the cores as core architectures are not tailored to support efficient isola- simple as possible. tion which is a mandatory requirement for logical partitions. In this paper, we show that a simple address-space isola- In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of enabling log- tion mechanism, that can be implemented in the Network- ical partitions on many-core processors, in order to integrate on-Chip of the many-core processor, is sufficient to enable the processors into IaaS clouds.