Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Optimizing network virtualization in Xen
ATEC '06 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical Conference
Transparent network services via a virtual traffic layer for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 16th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
High performance and scalable I/O virtualization via self-virtualized devices
Proceedings of the 16th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
XenLoop: a transparent high performance inter-vm network loopback
HPDC '08 Proceedings of the 17th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
VDE: an emulation environment for supporting computer networking courses
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
virtio: towards a de-facto standard for virtual I/O devices
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - Research and developments in the Linux kernel
Protection strategies for direct access to virtualized I/O devices
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
Towards high-quality I/O virtualization
SYSTOR '09 Proceedings of SYSTOR 2009: The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference
Crossbow: from hardware virtualized NICs to virtualized networks
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Virtualized infrastructure systems and architectures
Evaluating and optimizing I/O virtualization in kernel-based virtual machine (KVM)
NPC'10 Proceedings of the 2010 IFIP international conference on Network and parallel computing
An emulation tool for PlanetLab
Computer Communications
Revisiting network I/O APIs: the netmap framework
Communications of the ACM
Netmap: a novel framework for fast packet I/O
USENIX ATC'12 Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
Scalable, high performance ethernet forwarding with CuckooSwitch
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Hyper-switch: a scalable software virtual switching architecture
USENIX ATC'13 Proceedings of the 2013 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
Towards minimalistic, virtualized content caches with minicache
Proceedings of the 2013 workshop on Hot topics in middleboxes and network function virtualization
Speeding up packet I/O in virtual machines
ANCS '13 Proceedings of the ninth ACM/IEEE symposium on Architectures for networking and communications systems
Shrinking the hypervisor one subsystem at a time: a userspace packet switch for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
A Measurement Study of Data-Intensive Network Traffic Patterns in a Private Cloud
UCC '13 Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
ClickOS and the art of network function virtualization
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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The growing popularity of virtual machines is pushing the demand for high performance communication between them. Past solutions have seen the use of hardware assistance, in the form of "PCI passthrough" (dedicating parts of physical NICs to each virtual machine) and even bouncing traffic through physical switches to handle data forwarding and replication. In this paper we show that, with a proper design, very high speed communication between virtual machines can be achieved completely in software. Our architecture, called VALE, implements a Virtual Local Ethernet that can be used by virtual machines, such as QEMU, KVM and others, as well as by regular processes. VALE achieves a throughput of over 17 million packets per second (Mpps) between host processes, and over 2 Mpps between QEMU instances, without any hardware assistance. VALE is available for both FreeBSD and Linux hosts, and is implemented as a kernel module that extends our recently proposed netmap framework, and uses similar techniques to achieve high packet rates.