Operating Systems
Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor
Proceedings of the General Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Memory resource management in VMware ESX server
OSDI '02 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementationCopyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading
Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
Unmodified device driver reuse and improved system dependability via virtual machines
OSDI'04 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 6
High performance VMM-bypass I/O in virtual machines
ATEC '06 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical Conference
High performance and scalable I/O virtualization via self-virtualized devices
Proceedings of the 16th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
Concurrent Direct Network Access for Virtual Machine Monitors
HPCA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
Protection strategies for direct access to virtualized I/O devices
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
Bridging the gap between software and hardware techniques for I/O virtualization
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
MyriXen: message passing in Xen virtual machines over Myrinet and Ethernet
Euro-Par'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Parallel processing
Flash memory performance on a highly scalable IOV system
WIOV'11 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on I/O virtualization
vPF_RING: towards wire-speed network monitoring using virtual machines
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Providing safe, user space access to fast, solid state disks
ASPLOS XVII Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Moving device virtualization from the virtual machine monitor (VMM) to the devices improves virtual-machine performance significantly, but it requires support from the devices. PCI and PCI Express (PCIe) devices can provide VMs with direct and secure I/O through the use of multiple functions per card, but at significant cost and inflexibility. One solution to help reduce the costs is the PCIe SR-IOV standard, which introduces lightweight, virtual PCIe functions. We are currently developing a highly configurable and programmable PCIe networking device which can change its behavior at runtime and which can provide a number of different types of device functions to the host system (e.g., standard NIC, specialized packet capturing devices, or crypto offload engines). We have found the PCIe SR-IOV standard to be too inflexible to support these types of devices, primarily due to its mechanism for configuring virtual functions. In this paper we propose an alternative approach which does not require additional silicon and provides significantly higher flexibility than SR-IOV. We achieve this by delegating enumeration and configuration of "software configurable virtual functions" to the main device driver for the device. Our solution is compatible with the higher layers of the PCI device stack of modern operating systems and hypervisors so that we can leverage all the existing mechanisms for hot-plugging, discovering devices, loading device drivers, and assigning PCI devices to virtual machines (including providing DMA isolation with IO-MMUs). We present details of a prototype implementation for Linux and Xen.