I/O Virtualization Design of FCoE Adapter

Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) presents challenges to PCIe devices. The single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) standard allows a PCIe device to be efficiently shared among Virtual Machines (VMs), without performance loss. We propose a design method for FCoE adapter. Based on the designed allocation scheme for Receive and Transmit queues, we put forward an allocation model from Virtual Functions (VFs) to VMs. This model can not only solve the problem of the limited number of VFs, but also distribute network bandwidth according to the VM´s needs. In addition, we implement a communication mechanism between Physical Function (PF) Driver and VF Driver based on the inter-domain communication mechanism in Xen. This design scheme we proposed will not only make full use of hardware resources to meet the requirement of I/O performance in CEE, but also provide a method for PF Driver-VF Driver communication to reduce the complexity of hardware design.