Intel x86 World Switch Benchmark

This project is applicable on Intel x86 CPU architectures. It has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Features

The tested world switches include:

1. syscall: ring 3 to ring 0
2. hypercall: VMX non-root to VMX root
3. SGX ecall: ring3 to ring3 SGX mode
4. smcall: ring 0 to ring -2 (system management mode, SMM)

Get Started

To enable particular test features, please read and modify the corresponding parameters in Include/user_define.h:

1. To enable x86-64 vmcall (or hypercall), you need to run this project in VMX non-root mode (using a guest VM);
2. To enable x86-64 smcall (trap the CPU to SMM mode), please grant sudo priviledge;
3. To enable Intel SGX ecall and ocall, please make sure you have SGX driver and SDK/PSW installed.

QEMU-SGX

To virtualize SGX-capable environments, use the following command: qemu-sgx/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1G -sgx epc=64MB -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 2,sockets=1,cores=2 -machine kernel_irqchip=split

To test co-operation speedup for sgx threads as in HotCalls, you need at least 2 logical processors available.

Testsuite Summary

1. Context Switch Overhead: syscall, hypercall, smcall, and ecall/ocall;
2. malloc and memset overhead in pure glibc, pure SGX SDK, and from outside to inside (EPC);
3. Synchronous in-enclave syscall and Asynchronous in-enclave syscall.