Multi-root Share of Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Compliant PCI Express Device

We have achieved sharing a single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) compliant PCI Express (PCIe) I/O device among multiple computers. A device share not only inside a single computer among virtual machines, but also among multiple computers attracts a great interest because it provides efficient utilization of computer resources. Because PCIe is originally a single-root system, realizing multi-root I/O virtualization is much more difficult than SR-IOV. We allocate virtual instances called VF of an SR-IOV-compliant I/O device to an individual computer by virtualizing IOV configuration and translating memory address of VF to that of the allocated computer. With the FPGA implementation, we have achieved sharing a commercially-available network interface card among three computers without modification in OS/driver and device itself. In addition, the performance reaches 99% of the device in the best case whereas the implementation is in the early stage, indicating this method provides not only MR sharing but high performance at the same time.