This session will include the following subject(s):
Enhanced Platform Awareness – For PCIe Devices:
Background: There is a growing movement in the telecommunications industry to transform the network. This transformation includes the distinct, but mutually beneficial disciplines of Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization. One of the challenges of virtualizing appliances in general, and virtualizing network functions in particular, is to deliver near native (i.e. non-virtualized) performance. Many virtual appliances have intense I/O requirements, many also could benefit from access to high performance accelerators for workloads such as cryptography, and others would like direct access to GPUs.
There is also a growing demand for the cloud OS to have greater awareness of the capabilities of the platforms it controls. The Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) related updates proposed to OpenStack aim to enable better informed decision making related to VM placement and help drive tangible improvements for cloud tenants. This EPA proposal focuses on how to leverage PCIe devices in cloud infrastructure, and looks in particular at Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) as one technology that can be used to dramatically improve the performance in the virtual machine.
Proposal: During this design session, the proposal is that the following topics will be covered: • Discuss the use cases for OpenStack managed PCI devices and allocation of Virtual Functions with SR-IOV. • Discuss the design proposal for enabling an SR-IOV solution. This shall include: o Nova enhancements to include a level of awareness of the PCI devices that are included in the platforms. o Scheduler/filter extensions to find platforms with a specified PCI device. o Hypervisor driver (libvirt in this first instance) additions to provision a VM with an SR-IOV PCI device. • The majority of the focus will be on accelerator type of devices. However, some concept proposals relating to how this could be extended to the allocation of SR-IOV Virtual Functions for NIC devices will be discussed. • Agree on a direction for a solution.
This design session and the related blueprint builds upon ideas already proposed in forum discussions and the following blueprints: nova/xenapi-gpu-passthrough nova/pci-passthrough nova/pci-passthrough-and-sr-iov
(Session proposed by Adrian Hoban)
libvirt pcipassthru support:
Add libvirt pcipassthru support for nova.
(Session proposed by Chuck Short)
Thursday April 18, 2013 11:50am - 12:30pm PDT
B113