RECAP: A region-based cure for the common cold (cache)

Abstract

Virtualization has become a magic bullet to increase utilization, improve security, lower costs, and reduce management overheads. In many scenarios, the number of virtual machines consolidated onto a single processor has grown even faster than the number of hardware threads. This results in multiprogrammed virtualization where many virtual machines time-share a single processor core. Such fine-grain sharing comes at a cost; each time a virtual machine gets scheduled by the hypervisor, it effectively begins with a cold cache, since any cache blocks it accessed in the past have likely been evicted by other virtual machines. © 2013 IEEE.