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.