An Integrated OS- plus VMM-bypass Solution for Virtualized I/O

Abstract

Current Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technologies are either not virtualization aware or run on proprietary connection fabrics such as InfiniBand, Myrinet and Quadrics. The introduction of 10-Gigabit Ethernet provides a high-speed connection that utilizes existing network infrastructure. As the first step to provide a useful, virtualization-aware RDMA implementation we propose an integrated OS- and VMM-bypass solution implemented on the Netronome NFE-i8000 Network Processor utilizing the Intel IXP 2855. We use this implementation to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of an integrated VMM- and OS-bypass communications engines that can be used to implement such a virtualized RDMA solution and to understand the architectural limitations of such an implementation.