Direct-Virtio: A New Direct Virtualized I/O Framework for NVMe SSDs

Abstract

Virtualization is a core technology for cloud computing, server consolidation and multi-platform support. However, there is a concern regarding performance degradation due to the duplicated I/O stacks virtualization environments. In this paper, we propose a new I/O framework, we refer to it as Direct-Virtio, that manipulates storage directly, which makes it feasible to avoid the duplicated overhead. In addition, we devise two novel mechanisms, called vectored I/O and adaptive polling, to process multiple I/O requests collectively and to check I/O completion efficiently. Real implementation-based evaluation shows that our proposal can enhance performance for both micro and macro benchmarks.