Research And Implementation Of Virtualized Nic Based On SR-IOV Technology

The early development of virtualization technology is mainly focused on the virtualization of CPU and memory. After years of development, the virtualization technology of CPU and memory has matured. However, I/O virtualization has been one of the bottlenecks in the development of virtualization technology and it restricts the performance of system. Therefore, improving the performance of I/O and the utilization of I/O devices is one of the focuses of the current virtualization technology.There are some primary technologies of I/O virtualization, such as device simulation, paravirtualization, Passthrough I/O, and so on. Software-based I/O virtualization has high universality, but can’t obtain high performance of I/O. Passthrough I/O has high performance, but it is at the expense of device sharing. SR-IOV specification proposed by PCI-SIG organization solves this problem. SR-IOV not only inherits the advantages of Passthrough I/O, but also shares devices. SR-IOV has a good development prospects.On the base of deep research and analysis of SR-IOV structure and principle, this paper studied the NIC virtualization technology based on SR-IOV. For Lin J Hypervisor, I designed and implemented the SR-IOV virtualization system based on Intel 82576 Gigabit Ethernet, and compared it with traditional I/O virtualization technologies through test. This paper also designed a resource management program for virtual NIC. Mainly for the insufficient flexibility in bandwidth allocation, I designed a bandwidth setting interface for users to set the bandwidth of virtual machine according to their needs.Test results show that using SR-IOV NIC not only can enhance the I/O performance, but also effectively reduce the CPU load when running multiple virtual machines. Implementation of bandwidth setting interface improves the flexibility of bandwidth allocation. Users can easily set the bandwidth of virtual machine through the interface.