F-Tile Avalon® Streaming Intel® FPGA IP for PCI Express* User Guide

ID 683140
Date 2/03/2023
Public

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4.4. Scalable IOV

Scalable IOV is a newly developed Intel virtualization solution targeted for next-generation CPU server platforms. Scalable IOV or SIOV, utilizes many existing PCI Express capability structures to support software-based virtualization. Scalable IOV provides more cost effect and scalable virtualization scheme without relying on physical functions and virtual functions.

Instead of hardware-based PF/VF resources, system software segments address space into Assignable Interfaces or AIs. AI is a lightweight data structure that replaces VFs. Configuration space for AIs is emulated by software; hence, hardware support for SIOV is inexpensive.

Host software then uses the Process Space Identified (PASID) TLP prefix to index into Guest Physical Address (GPA) and Host Physical Address (HPA) tables and translate to a proper physical address. Guest OS drivers can then be assigned one or more AIs by the host OS/VM.

In supporting PASID prefixes, the PCIe controllers pass the additional 32-bit TLP prefix portion of the header to the PLD fabric for building soft logic-based AIs.