Built-in Device Simulator for OS Performance Evaluation

I/O devices are evolving rapidly, while OS optimization is always slower because of its dependence on physical devices. This inevitably prevents latest devices from working with their rating performance, which remains a big problem for performance-critical applications. Though I/O device simulators can help carry out performance evaluation before physical devices are ready, the existing simulator implementations are still unsatisfactory, either having too big overhead or requiring too much extra work. In this paper, we propose kernel built-in device simulation to provide accurate real time evaluations with acceptable extra effort. With the work of simulation well isolated, the overhead is reasonable compared to native environment. A bonding Ethernet interface is implemented in this way and experiments on it confirm the close-to-native performance of the idea.