GTS AXI Streaming Intel® FPGA IP for PCI Express* User Guide

ID 813754
Date 5/15/2024
Public

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4.13. Scalable IOV

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

Instead of hardware-based PF/VF resources, the system software segments the address space into Assignable Interfaces (AI). AI is a lightweight data structure that replaces VFs. Configuration space for AIs is emulated by software; hence, hardware support for Scalable IOV 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 Operating System (OS) drivers can then be assigned one or more AIs by the Host OS/VM. In supporting PASID prefixes, the GTS AXI Streaming IP passes the additional 32-bit TLP prefix portion of the header to the PLD fabric for building soft logic-based AIs.

Using a software-based approach also provides a simplified solution for resource migration, as compared to the SR-IOV VF migration flow.