Technical overview & performance evaluation of Virtio-loopback

The increasing complexity and proprietary nature of modern hardware solutions necessitate maintaining local forks of the Linux kernel with corresponding drivers, leading to significant maintainability challenges. User-space drivers have emerged as a promising solution, offering greater portability and reduced dependency on kernel revisions. However, these drivers also bring their own issues, such as vendor-specific APIs and lack of backward compatibility, which can increase the maintenance burden.To address these challenges, a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) designed for non-hypervisor environments is necessary. Leveraging well-established virtio and vhost-user technologies, Virtio-loopback [6] provides a standardized interface that ensures compatibility and performance stability. This HAL aims to mitigate the issues associated with user-space drivers and support seamless application development without extensive modifications.The primary contribution of this paper is the technical overview and performance evaluation of Virtio-loopback technology across various hardware architectures, including RISC-V, ARM64, and x86. Through this process, we evaluate Virtio-loopback’s design against current standards and compare its performance with solutions like vDUSE. Our results indicate that Virtio-loopback meets contemporary performance standards, making it a viable candidate for operating as a HAL in nonhypervisor scenarios.