KVM Forum 2018

I/O virtualization is one of the most important aspect of virtualization technology. Generally speaking we can have three types of I/O devices in a virtual machine: emulated, para-virtualized, and device assignment. Here device assignment plays a vital role in performance critical scenarios, which allows a guest to seamlessly manipulate a real hardware device. However it was never safe to run DPDK with such a device before in the guest, and even impossible for nested virtualization due to lack of IO page mapping mechanism. In this presentation, Peter Xu will introduce his work on QEMU/KVM vIOMMU to enable these scenarios. It will contain not only how new users can start using the new feature, but also technical details and challenges on the project.