I/O-GUARD: Hardware/Software Co-Design for I/O Virtualization with Guaranteed Real-time Performance

For safety-critical| computer systems, time-predictability and performance are usually required simultaneously in I/O virtualization. However, both requirements are challenging to achieve due to complex I/O access path and resource management at system level and lack of support from preemptive scheduling at I/O hardware level. In this paper, we propose a new framework, I/O-GUARD, which reconstructs the system architecture of I/O virtualization, bringing a dedicated hardware hypervisor to handle resource management throughout the system. The hypervisor improves system real-time performance by enabling preemptive scheduling in I/O virtualization with both analytical and experimental real-time guarantees. Specifically, I/O-GUARD is a First-of-Its-Kind framework for multi-/many-core I/O virtualization.