Virtualization Services: Accelerated I/O Support in Multi-Core Systems

Virtualization services permit I/O subsystems and peripheral devices to be virtualized by placing select functionality on specialized cores and/or on cores situated 'closer' to devices. The approach is used to implement Self-Virtualized I/O (SVIO), which off-loads certain virtualization functionality onto the cores available on the I/O device, accelerating I/O functions, efficiently using key performance-limiting resources in multicore systems, i.e., memory and I/O bandwidth, and exploiting the parallelism inherent in multi-core architectures. This paper evaluates a concrete instance of self-virtualized I/O, a SelfVirtualized Network Interface (SV-NIC), targeting the high end NICs used in datacenters.