Xen Developer Summit 2015

For devices supporting appropriate PCI-Express capabilities, OS may use the DMA remapping Hardware capabilities to share virtual address space of application processes with I/O devices. Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) along with support for I/O page-faults enables application programs to freely pass arbitrary data-structures to devices such as graphics processors or accelerators, without the overheads of pinning and marshalling of data.

For a guest with an Intel GPU assigned, we need to advertise the SVM capability so that it can use the feature and gain performance improvement by sharing the GPU and CPU page tables.

In this presentation, Feng will talk about the mechanism of SVM support in Intel VT-d hardware and its advantages, as well as high-level design options for SVM in Xen.