[2016] An Introduction to PCI Device Assignment with VFIO by Alex Williamson

VFIO is a Linux kernel userspace driver framework used by QEMU to make devices directly assignable to virtual machines. This model replaces the now deprecated Legacy KVM device assignment driver. In this talk, Alex Williamson will give an overview of how VFIO works, how a device, in particular a PCI device, is decomposed and exported to userspace, and how a userspace application like QEMU recomposes the device into a virtual machine. Additionally, Alex will highlight the interfaces used to accelerate VFIO through KVM to achieve performance parity with legacy device assignment, while not creating hard dependencies to KVM.


Alex Williamson
Red Hat

Alex Williamson has been contributing to the Linux kernel and other open source projects for over ten years and is the maintainer of the VFIO userspace driver interface in the Linux kernel and VFIO-based PCI device assignment in QEMU. Alex currently works for Red Hat from his home in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Slides: http://www.linux-kvm.org/images/5/54/...