In Unix-like operating systems, everything is abstracted as a file. Device files are the files that abstract I/O devices. We have been exploring virtualization of I/O devices using device files as the boundary. Paradice is our I/O paravirtualization solution that uses the device file boundary. You can find more details on Paradice in our ASPLOS’14 paper:

Ardalan Amiri Sani, Kevin Boos, Shaopu Qin, and Lin Zhong, "I/O Paravirtualization at the Device File Boundary," in Proc. ACM ASPLOS, March 2014. (PDF)

People

1. Supported hypervisors

Paradice was originally released for the Xen hypervisor (as also reported in our ASPLOS’14 paper). We have also ported Paradice to run on the KVM hypervisor. Paradice on KVM is currently in beta release as we are debugging it. You can find the instructions and a discussions of limitations for each hypervisor below.

2. ChangeLog

  • May 12, 2014: version 1.0 is released.

  • September 4, 2014: Beta support for KVM released.

3. Supported Features

The released source code only supports a subset of functionalities/features reported in the paper. The rest of features/functionalities will be supported in future releases as they are thoroughly tested. Please see below for more details.

  • Full virtualization of device file operations, needed to paravirtualize an I/O device at the device file boundary. The code currently has been tested only with 32-bit x86 with PAE.

  • Required extensions to Xen. (Xen 4.2.2)

  • Required extensions to KVM.

  • Kernel modules needed for virtualization using the Xen and KVM hypervisors.

  • Required extensions to the Linux kernel. (Kernel 3.2.0.33)

  • Support for Radeon GPUs and input devices. However, note that only Radeon HD 6450 has been fully tested with the released code.

  • Support for fault isolation for most file operations except for ioctls (only for the Xen hypervisor).

  • Seamless switching between guest VMs graphical sessions (only for the

  • KVM hypervisor).

    • Future release plan. The following features are currently missing. They will be released after they are thoroughly tested.

  • Seamless switching between guest VMs graphical sessions for the Xen

  • hypervisor.

  • Support for other I/O devices including the camera, audio devices, and Ethernet card (for the netmap framework). This feature requires the device info modules for these devices.

  • Fault isolation support for ioctls. This requires the list of memory operations required by ioctls of each driver (for Xen).

  • Device data isolation. This will require extension to the hypervisor and modification to the driver (for Xen).

  • Support for Intel GPUs.