A Novel Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Approach for Network Interface Card

This paper presents a novel hardware-assisted virtualization approach for network interface card (NIC) so as to enable direct network access by guest operating system (GOS) in virtual machine monitor (VMM). With the conventional I/O virtualization method, VMM provides a simulation software interface for GOS usage and traps the access instruction when the GOS attempts to use the virtual device. We successfully designed the dual NICs arbitration mechanism and bypassed the interference of Qemu/dm. This approach improves host and guest operating systems networking performance by perceiving the real hardware interrupt and accessing the real hardware address space. Some of the bottlenecks by software simulation can be eliminated without more privilege levels transformation or intricate drives. The throughput and CPU utilization in experiment results demonstrate the high performance of direct access with minimal VMM involvement.