Energy-Efficient Mapping Technique for Virtual Processors

Virtualization provides an excellent solution to resolve the portability, maintainability, development, and utilization problems in many system designs. In this paper, we are interested in energy-efficient designs for platform virtualization. In particular, we explore the computing resource mapping between virtual cores and physical cores and their energy consumption relationship when timing constraints in task executions are considered. Real-time and non-real-time task workloads are both considered in the study, where the computing needs of each virtual core is modeled with a computing server. A prototype with DVS support is implemented based on a $mu$-kernel architecture. The capability and overheads of the proposed design was evaluated, for which we have encouraging results.