KVM Forum 2015

As we have continued on KVM enhancements for NFV since the last KVM Forum, we provide an update and details on the enhancements, focusing on the two top priority features as the NFV hypervisor: deterministic execution and inter-VM (Virtual Machine) communication. Deterministic execution is required to guarantee minimal latency variation for data plane NFV, and there are various factors that contribute to latencies and jitters. We present our solutions, showing how hardware and software enhancements can help when reducing latency variations. To implement inter-VM communication using our memory view switching feature, we employ the vhost-user feature in vswitches. By sharing information with vswitches, the source VM can directly access the destination VM or the shared pages in a protected and efficient fashion. We show an implementation that works with OVS that uses the DPDK netdev.