HyperV: A High Performance Hypervisor for Virtualization of the Programmable Data Plane

P4 is a domain specific language designed to define the behavior of a programmable data plane. It facilitates offloading hardware-suitable Network Functions (NFs) to a data plane. Consequently, NFs can maximally benefit from high performance of hardware devices, meanwhile more CPU power can be reserved for user applications. However, since the programmable data plane provides an NF with an exclusive network context, different NFs cannot operate on the same data plane simultaneously. Besides, it is hardly possible to dynamically reconfigure programmable network devices without interrupting the operation of a data plane. Therefore, we propose HyperV, a high performance hypervisor for virtualization of a P4 specific data plane, to provide both non-exclusive and uninterrupted features.We implemented HyperV based on a P4-BMv2 target and a DPDK target respectively. Then we evaluated BMv2-target HyperV by comparing with Hyper4, a recently proposed hypervisor, and evaluated DPDK- target HyperV by comparing with PISCES and Open vSwitch. Results show that BMv2- target HyperV averagely prevails over Hyper4 2.5x in performance while reducing resource usage by 4x. DPDK-target HyperV performs comparably to Open vSwitch and PISCES, with the worst case of a throughput penalty in less than 7\%, while providing a powerful capability of virtualization which neither of them provides.