Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dmitry Meshchaninov

Shuvabrata Ganguly

Aditya Bhandari

Suyash Sinha

Dexter Paul Bradshaw

A method and system for establishing more direct access to a storage device from unprivileged code are described. Using a storage infrastructure mechanism to discover and enumerate storage architecture component(s), a user mode application requests a portion of the storage device to store application-related data. That portion is mapped to an address space representing the application-related data. The storage infrastructure mechanism determines whether the user mode application is authorized to access the storage device and if satisfied, the storage infrastructure mechanism configures at least one path for the user mode application to perform block-level input/output between the storage device and an unprivileged storage architecture component. A completion notification mechanism may be selected or established for returning information related to input/output requests.

Storage device access using unprivileged software code

In a virtual machine environment, a hypervisor is configured to expose a virtual cache topology to a guest operating system, such that the virtual cache topology may be provided by corresponding physical cache topology. The virtual cache topology may be determined by the hypervisor or, in the case of a datacenter environment, may be determined by the datacenter's management system. The virtual cache topology may be calculated from the physical cache topology of the system such that virtual machines may be instantiated with virtual processors and virtual cache that may be mapped to corresponding logical processors and physical cache.

Exposure of virtual cache topology to a guest operating system

Techniques for configuring a hypervisor scheduler to make use of cache topology of processors and physical memory distances between NUMA nodes when making scheduling decisions. In the same or other embodiments the hypervisor scheduler can be configured to optimize the scheduling of latency sensitive workloads. In the same or other embodiments a hypervisor can be configured to expose a virtual cache topology to a guest operating system running in a virtual machine.

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Maple Valley, WA, United States of America

Dmitry Meshchaninov