Building a KVM-based Hypervisor for a Heterogeneous System Architecture Compliant System

Abstract

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is an architecture developed by the HSA foundation aiming at reducing programmability barriers as well as improving communication efficiency for heterogeneous computing. For example, HSA allows heterogeneous computing devices to share the same virtual address space. This feature allows programmers to bypass explicit data copying between devices, as was required in the past. HSA features such as job dispatching through user level queues and memory based signaling help to reduce communication latency between the host and other computing devices. While the new features in HSA enable more efficient heterogeneous computing, they also introduce new challenges to system virtualization, especially in memory virtualization and I/O virtualization. This work investigates the issues involved in HSA virtualization and implements a KVM-based hypervisor that supports the main features of HSA inside guest operating systems. Furthermore, this work shows that with the newly introduced hypervisor for HSA, system resources in HSA-compliant AMD Kaveri can be effectively shared between multiple guest operating systems.