Metis: a profiling toolkit based on the virtualization of hardware performance counters

Abstract

Abstract Background With wide application of virtualization technology, the demand is increasing for performance analysis and system diagnosis in virtualization environment. There are some profiling toolkits based on hardware events, such as OProfile in native Linux and Xenoprof in Xen virtual machine environment. However, sometimes users in different domains need monitor different hardware events individually at the same time. For programming and profiling in environment for virtual machine, it may become popular in the coming future. In this paper, we present Metis, a system-wide profiling toolkit for Xen virtual machine environment based on the virtualization of hardware performance counters. Methods Virtualization of hardware performance counters is used to enable profiling of processes and routines running in the domain or Xen virtual machine monitor. Results This toolkit allows multiple users in different domains to monitor different hardware events simultaneously in Xen virtual machine environment, obtaining the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles, instruction execution and cache misses, etc. Our experiments with a real-world benchmark demonstrate the good performance of Metis. Conclusion Comparing to all the existing profiling toolkits, Metis is different which enables multiple users in different virtual machines to monitor different CPU events simultaneously, and users in different domains can use this toolkit individually without affecting each other. We apply a popular benchmark to verify the correctness of Metis and its cool features.