VMRPC: A high efficiency and light weight RPC system for virtual machines

Despite advances in high performance inter-domain communication for virtual machines (VM), data intensive applications developed for VMs based on traditional remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism still suffer from performance degradation due to the inherent inefficiency of data serialization/deserilization operation. This paper presents VMRPC, a light-weight RPC framework specifically designed for VMs that leverages heap and stack sharing to circumvent unnecessary data copying and serialization/deserilization, and achieve high performance. Our evaluation shows that the performance of VMRPC is an order of magnitude better than traditional RPC systems and existing alternative inter-domain communication mechanisms. We adopt VMRPC in a real system, and the experiment results exhibit that the performance of VMRPC is even competitive to native environment.