Self-Virtualized I/O: High Performance, Scalable I/O Virtualization in Multi-Core Systems

Overview

Virtualizing I/O subsystems and peripheral devices is an integral part of system virtualization. This paper advocates the notion of self-virtualized I/O (SV-IO). Specifically, it proposes a hypervisor-level abstraction that permits guest virtual machines to efficiently exploit the multi-core nature of future machines when interacting with virtualized I/O. The concrete instance of SV-IO developed and evaluated herein provides virtual interfaces to an underlying physical device, the network interface, and manages the way in which the device's physical resources are used by guest operating systems.