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apitoday at 1:00 AM3 repliesview on HN

What's the performance impact for nested virtualization in general? I'd think this would be adding multiple layers of MMU overhead.


Replies

blibbletoday at 2:08 AM

depends on the workload and how they've done it

pure CPU should be essentially unaffected, if they're not emulating the MMU/page tables in software

the difference in IO ranges from barely measurable to absolutely horrible, depending on their implementation

traps/vmexits have another layer to pass through (and back)

dwattttttoday at 1:16 AM

From memory, the virtualisation operations themselves aren't nested. The VM instructions interact with the external virtualisation hardware, so it's more of a cooperative situation, e.g. a guest can create & manage virtualisation structures that are run alongside it.

I don't know if this applies to the specific nested virtualisation AWS are providing though.

otterleytoday at 2:00 AM

As a practical matter, anywhere from 5-15%.