I/O Virtualization in Networking

There are many different reasons for companies and organizations to invest in virtualization today, but it is probably safe to assume that financial motivation is number one on the list. Virtualization can save a lot of money. This thesis deals with the problem of I/O virtualization in the network environment in order to keep pace with this trend. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to develop working I/O virtualization software drivers that operate with FPGA-accelerated cards, thus enhancing their potential even more and saving the operational costs of big data centers. Their main benefits should be re-usability (flexibility) in a virtualized environment with the smallest possible performance loss. The theoretical part deals with current trends in I/O virtualization, technologies such as virtio, vhost, SR-IOV, VFIO and mediated devices. The practical part of this thesis suggests two ways of addressing this problematic. The first is to use software-emulation virtio technology. The second is based on the hybrid paravirtualization VFIO-mdev technology. Both approaches have different benefits in terms of performance and device manageability. Each solution's use case has its own drawback, like the complexity of the solution and the problematic integration into the system. The desired goals were achieved and manifested in the final form of the prototype driver nfb_mdev.

virtualization technologies, I/O device virtualization, peripherals, software drivers, computer networks, network cards, KVM, QEMU, PCI-Express, IOMMU, PASID, Intel VT-d, Netcope, NDK, FPGA, virtio, vhost, SR-IOV, VFIO, mediated devices - mdev