Fast Networking With Socket-Outsourcing in Hosted Virtual Machine Environments

This paper proposes a novel method of achieving fast networking in hosted Virtual Machine (VM) environments. This method, called socket-outsourcing, replaces the socket layer in a guest Operating System (OS) with the socket layer of the host OS. Socket-outsourcing increases network performance by eliminating duplicate message copying in both the host OS and the guest OS. Furthermore, socket-outsourcing significantly enhances inter-VM communication within the same host OS since it enables network packets to bypass the protocol stack in guest OSes. Socketoutsourcing was implemented in two representative operating systems (Linux and NetBSD) and on two virtual machine monitors (Linux KVM and PansyVM).