EVEREST Runtime Environment Virtualization: Virtualizing FPGA access on Arm and x86

A webinar about Virtual Open Systems activities on FPGA access virtualization in the EVEREST project

Virtual Open Systems is leading the EVEREST H2020 project virtualization and runtime activities with the objective of creating a flexible runtime solution supporting virtualization and heterogeneous hardware. Such an objective is addressed enabling KVM guests acceleration for both CPU and PCIe attached FPGAs.

In this webinar FPGA virtualization solutions and challenges are described, presenting a video demonstration of virtio-fpga, our most recent development activity performed on the Xilinx MPSoC. virtio-fpga is a set of QEMU and kernel extensions for KVM virtual machines, that enables FPGA usage and configuration from guests running on the ZCU102 board equipped with Armv8 CPUs.

With virtio-fpga, guests running on a Xilinx MPSoC machine can access and program the FPGA

Finally, the video webinar ends with an overview of new activities based on x86 processors and PCIe Xilinx FPGA cards. In fact, the next Virtual Open Systems activities in EVEREST will be focused on PCIe attached FPGAs aiming at enabling flexible utilization of SR-IOV. The idea is to dynamically attach accelerators to the VMs at the highest speed. The result of this work will be a PCI-e specific FPGA virtualization framework that enables VF attachment and detachment to the VMs.