A Survey of Live Migration Techniques for SR-IOV Device Pass-Through

Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a modern specification proposed by PCI-SIG that allows a PCI Express (PCIe) device to be utilized as multiple virtual functions (VF). By assigning VFs to virtual machines (VM) as pass-through devices, the VMs can achieve superior I/O performance. However, SR-IOV device pass-through is not compatible with live migration, which is an indispensable infrastructure management feature in virtualization. Therefore, live migration solutions for SR-IOV device pass-through have been a hot topic in I/O virtualization research area. This paper studies the challenge of SR-IOV device pass-through and provides a comprehensive survey of corresponding live migration techniques. Our primary goal is to propose a research overview to demonstrate the state-of-the-art SR-IOV live migration issues.