Flexible Device Sharing in PCIe Clusters using Device Lending
Jonas Markussen, Lars Bjørlykke Kristiansen, Håkon Kvale Stensland, Friedrich Seifert, Carsten Griwodz, Pål Halvorsen · 2018
Processing workloads may have very high IO demands, exceeding the capabilities provided by resource virtualization and requiring direct access to the physical hardware. For computers that are interconnected in PCI Express (PCIe) networks, we have previously proposed Device Lending as a solution for assigning devices to remote hosts. In this paper, we explain how we have extended our implementation with support for the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Using our extended Device Lending, it becomes possible to dynamically "pass through" physical remote devices to VM guests while still retaining the flexibility of virtualization, something that previously required extensive facilitation in both hypervisor and device drivers in the form of paravirtualization.