Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom and Hakim Weatherspoon
USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud)
Philadelphia, PA, June 2014
Abstract. This paper introduces a software defined device driver layer
that enables new ways of wiring devices within and
across cloud environments. It builds on the split
driver model, which is used in paravirtualization
(e.g., Xen) to multiplex hardware devices across all
VMs. In our approach, called the Banana Double-Split
Driver Model, the back-end portion of the driver is
resplit and rewired such that it can be connected to
a different back-end driver on another
hypervisor. Hypervisors supporting Banana cooperate
with each other to (1) expose a consistent interface
to rewire the back-end drivers, (2) allow different
types of connections (e.g., tunnels, RDMA, etc.) to
coexist and be hot-swapped to optimize for
placement, proximity, and hardware, and (3) migrate
backend connections between hypervisors to maintain
connectivity irrespective of physical location. We
have implemented an early prototype of Banana for
network devices. We show how network devices can be
split, rewired, and live migrated across cloud
providers with as low as 1.4 sec of downtime, while
fully maintaining the logical topology between
application components.
Keywords. Virtualization, Device Driver, Cloud, Xen
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-banana-hotcloud-2014,
author = {Dan and Williams and Hani and Jamjoom and Hakim and Weatherspoon},
title = {{Software Defining System Devices with the ‘Banana’ Double-Split Driver Model}},
booktitle = {USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud)},
address = {Philadelphia, PA},
month = {June},
year = {2014}
}