Implementing NVMe over Fabrics in FreeBSD - John Baldwin - EuroBSDcon 2023
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2023-10-02

John Baldwin: Implementing NVMe over Fabrics in FreeBSD 
NVMe over Fabrics is an extension of the NVMe specification that permits use of storage devices over a network. It is similar to how iSCSI permits access to storage devices using SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network connection. NVMe over Fabrics supports multiple transports including Fibre Channel, RDMA (both iWarp and ROCE), and TCP/IP.

The author has been working on an implementation of NVMe over Fabrics for FreeBSD. The current work includes a simple userspace host (initiator) using the TCP transport as well as an extension to nvmecontrol(8) to discover remote controllers. At the time of submission the author is implementing a kernel-side host using the TCP transport. By the time of the talk the author expects to have completed the kernel-side host as well as a kernel-side controller (target).

The talk will discuss NVMe over Fabrics in general as well as a description of the implementation for FreeBSD.

John Baldwin:
John has been a FreeBSD committer for over 20 years with experience in various parts of the kernel. John is also fond of using debugging tools and is the FreeBSD maintainer for GDB as well as the maintainer of the FreeBSD kgdb fork of GDB.