This is a new project submission and is in the discussion phase. Updates coming soon.

• Proposed name for the project: "NFV Hypervisors-KVM"
• Proposed name for the repository: kvmfornfv
• Project Categories:
  • Requirements
  • Collaborative Development

The NFV hypervisors provide crucial functionality in the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI). The existing hypervisors, however, are not necessarily designed or targeted to meet the requirements for the NFVI, and we need to make collaborative efforts toward enabling the NFV features.

In this project, we focus on the KVM hypervisor to enhance it for NFV, by looking at the following areas initially:

1. Minimal Interrupt latency variation for data plane VNFs: a) Minimal Timing Variation for Timing correctness of real-time VNFs, b) Minimal packet latency variation for data-plane VNFs
2. Inter-VM communication,
3. Fast live migration

Some of the above items would require software development and/or specific hardware features, and some need just configurations information for the system (hardware, BIOS, OS, etc.).

We include a requirements gathering stage as a formal part of the project. For each subproject, we will start with an organized requirement stage so that we can determine specific use cases (e.g. what kind of VMs should be live migrated) and requirements (e.g. interrupt latency, jitters, Mpps, migration-time, down-time, etc.) to set out the performance goals.

Potential future projects would include:

1. Dynamic scaling (via scale-out) using VM instantiation
2. Fast live migration for SR-IOV

The output of this project will provide for each area:

1. A list of the performance goals, which will be obtained by the OPNFV members (as described above)
2. A set of comprehensive instructions for the system configurations (hardware features, BIOS setup, kernel parameters, VM configuration, options to QEMU/KVM, etc.)
3. The above features to the upstream of Linux, the real-time patch set, KVM, QEMU, libvirt, and
4. Performance and interrupt latency measurement tools.