Towards Testing the Performance Influence of Hypervisor Hypercall Interface Behavior

Abstract

With the continuing rise of cloud technology hypervisors play a vital role in the performance and reliability of current services. Hypervisors offer so-called hypercall interfaces for communication with the hosted virtual machines. These interfaces require thorough robustness to assure performance, security, and reliability. Existing research focusses on finding hypercall-related vulnerabilities. In this work, we discuss open challenges regarding hypercall interfaces. To address these challenges, we propose an extensive framework architecture to perform robustness testing on hypercall interfaces. This framework supports test campaigns and modeling of hypercall interfaces.