Un-IOV: Achieving Bare-Metal Level I/O Virtualization Performance for Cloud Usage With Migratability, Scalability and Transparency

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 73; no. 7; pp. 1655 - 1668
• Main Authors: Zhang, Zongpu, Xia, Chenbo, Liang, Cunming, Li, Jian, Yu, Chen, Bie, Tiwei, Martin, Roberts, Dan, Daly, Wang, Xiao, Liu, Yong, Guan, Haibing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.07.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accelerators; Cloud computing; Hardware; I/O virtualization; Kernel; live migration; Performance evaluation; SR-IOV; Switches; Virtual machine monitors; Virtualization
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2024.3375589

I/O virtualization is utilized by cloud platforms to provide tenants with efficient, scalable, and manageable network and storage services. The de-facto industrial standard, paravirtualization, offers rich cloud functionality by introducing split front-end and back-end drivers in the guest and host operating systems, respectively. Given this fact, paravirtualization incurs host inefficiency and performance overhead. Thus, emerging hardware virtio accelerators (i.e., SRIOV-capable devices that conform to virtio specification) with device passthrough technologies mitigate the performance issue. However, adopting these devices presents the challenge of insufficient support for live migration. This paper proposes Un-IOV, a novel I/O virtualization system that simultaneously achieves bare-metal level I/O performance and migratability. The key idea is to develop a new hybrid virtualization stack with: (1) a host-bypassed direct data path for virtio accelerators, and (2) a relayed control path guaranteeing seamless live migration support. Un-IOV achieves high scalability by consuming minimum host resources. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that Un-IOV achieves superior network and storage virtualization performance than software implementations with comparable performance of direct passthrough I/O virtualization, while imposing zero guest modification (i.e., guest transparency).