Solarflare and the Art of Virtualised IO

Many Ethernet controller companies have been talking the talk about accelerating virtualised IO. Not many are able to walk the walk. Solarflare by contrast has quietly been working at making high-speed networking a reality for the Citrix Xen virtual environment.

Following our architectural proposal  at the Xen 2006 summit, Solarflare developed a new API for the Xen hypervisor to support direct guest acceleration. This work was accepted into xen-devel and results including  accelerated virtualised iSCSI initiator performance were presented at the Xen 2007 summit and elsewhere.

More recently, Solarflare has submitted its accelerated driver set which implements the Citrix Xen direct guest acceleration API for the SFC4000 controller range.

High performance virtualised network IO takes us one step closer to ubiquitous virtualisation.

Thanks to Kieran, Greg and David for reminding me that our Euro-Par '07 paper provides a good write-up of the 2006 work: Download SF-101106-TC-4.pdf