RosebudVirt: A High-Performance and Partially Reconfigurable FPGA Virtualization Framework for Multitenant Networks

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are key accelerators in cloud data centers due to their parallelism and programmability. However, challenges such as low hardware utilization and high virtualization overhead persist. This brief presents RosebudVirt, a high-performance and partially reconfigurable FPGA virtualization framework tailored for multitenant networks. It enhances the original Rosebud by introducing single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support, partitioning the PCIe-attached FPGA device into multiple physical functions (PFs) and virtual functions (VFs) accessible to the linux kernel via PF and VF drivers. This facilitates direct mapping among tenants, VFs, and reconfigurable packet-processing units (RPUs) within the FPGA. RosebudVirt achieves near-native throughput with
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1% area overhead and increases hardware utilization by up to 7.6 times by additional VF drivers and network interfaces. What is more, RosebudVirt is compatible with Kubernetes and Docker.