Vagabond
Kallol Dey, Debadatta Mishra, Purushottam Kulkarni · 2014
One of the biggest challenges of virtualization today is to efficiently share and manage network devices among different virtual machines (VMs). Software-based network virtualization solutions like device emulation and split driver device models have advantages of resource sharing and fine grained hypervisor resource control. However, software based approaches have performance and scalability impediments due to the software interventions for every I/O activity. Recent hardware advancements in network devices allow in-device partitioning and assignment of network functions to different guest operating systems. The nature of the assignment is static which gives rise to inflexibility in efficient network resource management. Additionally, fine grained hypervisor control on the network device is compromised because of the direct hardware assignment to the guest virtual machine.