LeapIO: Efficient and Portable Virtual NVMe Storage on ARM SoCs
Huaicheng Li, Mingzhe Hao, Stanko Novaković, Vaibhav Gogte, Sriram Govindan, Dan R. K. Ports, Irene Y. Zhang, Ricardo Bianchini, Haryadi S. Gunawi, Anirudh Badam · 2020
Today's cloud storage stack is extremely resource hungry, burning 10-20% of datacenter x86 cores, a major "storage tax" that cloud providers must pay. Yet, the complex cloud storage stack is not completely offload-ready to today's IO accelerators. We present LeapIO, a new cloud storage stack that leverages ARM-based co-processors to offload complex storage services. LeapIO addresses many deployment challenges, such as hardware fungibility, software portability, virtualizability, composability, and efficiency. It uses a set of OS/software techniques and new hardware properties that provide a uni- form address space across the x86 and ARM cores and ex- pose virtual NVMe storage to unmodified guest VMs, at a performance that is competitive with bare-metal servers.