Virtual Open Systems Newsletter

Network Functions Virtualization NFV virtual switch, VOSYSwitch and Small Cells, Mixed-Criticatility and Parallel QEMU

Product development: VOSYSwitch user space virtual switch

Virtual Open Systems develops VOSYSwitch, an innovative virtual switch for NFV Infrastructures which combines the performance of SR-IOV with the benefits of a user space software switch (i.e., flexibility, programmability, portability, etc.). VOSYSwitch extends the SnabbSwitch open source project, written in Lua. By making use of LuaJIT trace compiler, VOSYSwitch is able to optimize dynamically its execution depending on the traffic flow history. VOSYSwitch outperforms the standard software switching technologies, providing performance comparable with NIC static allocation (VFIO and SR-IOV). Finally, VOSYSwitch design is architecture agnostic, thus seamlessly meant not only for x86, but also for ARMv8 accelerated heterogeneous server platforms.

Architecture research: Trusted APPS (TAPPS) for open CPS

With its activity in the H2020 TAPPS project, Virtual Open Systems is designing a novel software infrastructure to support coexistence of a safety critical Real Time operating system along with efficient In Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) virtualization, extended with embedded accelerators (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs, etc.). TrustZone and virtualization technologies based on Linux/KVM are used to isolate real time automotive tasks (e.g., CAN bus interaction, advanced driver assistance systems functions, etc. ) from third party applications coming from automotive graded web apps providers.

NFV-SDN dissemination: Virtual Open Systems at IEEE NFV-SDN 2015 conference

Virtual Open Systems has been selected to present a scientific paper at the IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization & Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), which will be held in San Francisco on November 18th-21st 2015. The name of the article is "SnabbSwitch userspace virtual switch benchmark and performance optimization for NFV", and consists in an extensive virtual switches benchmark study for KVM virtual machines in NFV environments. The paper details the performance of SnabbSwitch, the open source project which gives foundation to VOSYSwitch, compared to OVS, OVS-DPDK, Linux bridge, VFIO and SR-IOV. VOSYSwitch performance results compare similar to those of hardware solutions (e.g., VFIO and SR-IOV) and better of OVS, OVS-DPDK and Linux bridge.

Open Source leadership: Parallel QEMU open source development

The commitment of Virtual Open Systems towards a real, multi-threaded QEMU has continued over the last months, with several patches shared by the company with the qemu-devel mailing list. Virtual Open Systems will continue to support and follow actively the development of this feature, that might be included in the official tree next year. Multi-threaded QEMU aims to enhance QEMU to be an even more suitable solution for modern, multi-core, SoC emulation and prototyping. Thanks also to the Virtual Open Systems contribution, QEMU will once again prove itself to be the most advanced open-source system emulator available.

Leading innovation: Small cells coordination for multi-tenancy edge service (SESAME)

SESAME is an EC H2020 project which targets 5G networking innovation by defining a new concept of small cell which supports virtualization and multi-tenancy through the combination of Network Functions Virtualization and Edge Cloud Computing paradigms. During this project, Virtual Open Systems will develop virtualization extensions to accelerate virtual machines computing and networking performance; the former will be enhanced by means of VFIO, API remoting and hardware assisted virtualization for accelerators (e.g., GPU, FPGA, etc.), the latter will use shared memory and user space virtual switches such as VOSYSwitch.

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