GIT-CERCS-07-19
Himanshu Raj, Balasubramanian Seshasayee, Karsten Schwan,
VMedia: Enhanced Multimedia Services in Virtualized Systems
This paper presents the VMedia multimedia virtualization framework, for
sharing media devices among multiple virtual machines (VMs).
The framework provides logical media devices to virtual
machines. These devices are exported via a well defined, higher level,
multimedia access interface to the applications and operating system running
in a virtual machine. By using semantically meaningful information, rather
than low-level raw data, within the VMedia framework, efficient virtualization
solutions can be created for physical devices shared by multiple virtual machines.
Experimental results demonstrate that the base cost of virtual device access via
VMedia is small compared to native physical device access, and in addition, that these costs scale well with an increasing number of guest VMs. Here, VMedia's MediaGraph abstraction is a key contributor, since it also allows the framework to support dynamic restructuring, in order to adapt device accesses to changing requirements. Finally, VMedia permits platforms to offer new and enhanced
logical device functionality at lower costs than those achievable with
alternative solutions.