Bring RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) Capability to Virtio-net Device - Yongji Xie, ByteDance
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2022-10-08

Bring RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) Capability to Virtio-net Device - Yongji Xie, ByteDance

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is playing a more and more important role in modern data centers due to the nature of high bandwidth, low latency and kernel bypass. To benefit from RDMA in a virtualized environment, the current solution is to passthrough the RDMA-capable network adapters to VMs. However, in virtio-based environments, this approach brings some additional complexity and maintenance costs since we have to maintain another passthrough network adapter. Another approach is to enable Soft-RoCE (rxe) in VMs, but the performance is not good enough since the guest kernel is still envolved in I/O datapath. In this talk, we will introduce a new approach to enable RDMA in virtio-based environments, namely, extending virtio-net device to support RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet). We'll discuss the design details, as well as showing comparison with other solutions, several open questions and the future plans.