Surgical Software-less I/O Virtualization
Francesco Ciraolo, Mattia Nicolella, Patrick Carpanedo, Denis Hoornaert, Marco Caccamo, Renato Mancuso · 2025
Virtualizing I/O devices presents unique challenges compared to other system resources. Traditional approaches rely on software-based abstraction layers, which can be particularly complex to develop and often fail to provide guests with efficient access to the underlying hardware. The most common solutions involve dedicating an I/O device exclusively to a single guest or modifying/patching the guest software to utilize hardware-level I/O multiplexing. This paper introduces I/O Softwareless Nano-Virtualization (IO-SNV), a novel approach that achieves efficient and transparent I/O virtualization with minimal overhead and no software modifications. IO-SNV operates entirely at the hardware level, leveraging programmable logic to dynamically virtualize I/O devices while maintaining high performance. We present the conceptual model, a proof-of-concept implementation, and an evaluation of its feasibility. Our promising results demonstrate that IO-SNV can provide seamless I/O virtualization while preserving device access efficiency, making a compelling alternative to existing software-centric solutions.