NVMeVirt is a versatile software-defined virtual NVMe device. It is implemented as a Linux kernel module providing the system with a virtual NVMe device of various kinds. Currently, NVMeVirt supports conventional SSDs, NVM SSDs, ZNS SSDs, etc. The device is emulated at the PCI layer, presenting a native NVMe device to the entire system. Thus, NVMeVirt has the capability not only to function as a standard storage device, but also to be utilized in advanced storage configurations, such as NVMe-oF target offloading, kernel bypassing, and PCI peer-to-peer communication.

Further details on the design and implementation of NVMeVirt can be found in the following papers.

• NVMeVirt: A Versatile Software-defined Virtual NVMe Device (FAST 2023)
• Empowering Storage Systems Research with NVMeVirt: A Comprehensive NVMe Device Emulator (Transactions on Storage 2023)

Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions or suggestions. Also you can raise an issue anytime for bug reports or discussions.

We encourage you to cite our paper at FAST 2023 as follows:

@InProceedings{NVMeVirt:FAST23,
  author = {Sang-Hoon Kim and Jaehoon Shim and Euidong Lee and Seongyeop Jeong and Ilkueon Kang and Jin-Soo Kim},
  title = {{NVMeVirt}: A Versatile Software-defined Virtual {NVMe} Device},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST)},
  address = {Santa Clara, CA},
  month = {February},
  year = {2023},
}

The recommended Linux kernel version is v5.15.x and higher (tested on Linux vanilla kernel v5.15.37 and Ubuntu kernel v5.15.0-58-generic).

A part of the main memory should be reserved for the storage of the emulated NVMe device. To reserve a chunk of physical memory, add the following option to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="memmap=64G\\\$128G"

This example will reserve 64GiB of physical memory chunk (out of the total 192GiB physical memory) starting from the 128GiB memory offset. You may need to adjust those values depending on the available physical memory size and the desired storage capacity.

After changing the /etc/default/grub file, you are required to run the following commands to update grub and reboot your system.

$ sudo update-grub
$ sudo reboot

Please download the latest version of nvmevirt from Github:

$ git clone https://github.com/snu-csl/nvmevirt

nvmevirt is implemented as a Linux kernel module. Thus, the kernel headers should be installed in the /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r) directory to compile nvmevirt.

Currently, you need to select the target device type by manually editing the Kbuild. You may find the following lines in the Kbuild, which imply that NVMeVirt is currently configured for emulating NVM(Non-Volatile Memory) SSD (such as Intel Optane SSD). You may uncomment other one to change the target device type. Note that you can select one device type at a time.

# Select one of the targets to build
CONFIG_NVMEVIRT_NVM := y
#CONFIG_NVMEVIRT_SSD := y
#CONFIG_NVMEVIRT_ZNS := y
#CONFIG_NVMEVIRT_KV := y

You may find the detailed configuration parameters for conventional SSD and ZNS SSD from ssd_config.h.

Build the kernel module by running the make command in the nvmevirt source directory.

$ make
make -C /lib/modules/5.15.37/build M=/path/to/nvmev modules
make[1]: Entering directory '/path/to/linux-5.15.37'
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/main.o
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/pci.o
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/admin.o
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/io.o
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/dma.o
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/simple_ftl.o
  LD [M]  /path/to/nvmev/nvmev.o
  MODPOST /path/to/nvmev/Module.symvers
  CC [M]  /path/to/nvmev/nvmev.mod.o
  LD [M]  /path/to/nvmev/nvmev.ko
  BTF [M] /path/to/nvmev/nvmev.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory '/path/to/linux-5.15.37'
$

nvmevirt is configured to emulate the NVM SSD by default. You can attach an emulated NVM SSD in your system by loading the nvmevirt kernel module as follows:

$ sudo insmod ./nvmev.ko \
  memmap_start=128G \       # e.g., 1M, 4G, 8T
  memmap_size=64G   \       # e.g., 1M, 4G, 8T
  cpus=7,8                  # List of CPU cores to process I/O requests (should have at least 2)

In the above example, memmap_start and memmap_size indicate the relative offset and the size of the reserved memory, respectively. Those values should match the configurations specified in the /etc/default/grub file shown earlier. In addition, the cpus option specifies the id of cores on which I/O dispatcher and I/O worker threads run. You have to specify at least two cores for this purpose: one for the I/O dispatcher thread, and one or more cores for the I/O worker thread(s).

When you are successfully load the nvmevirt module, you can see something like these from the system message.

$ sudo dmesg
[  144.812917] nvme nvme0: pci function 0001:10:00.0
[  144.812975] NVMeVirt: Successfully created virtual PCI bus (node 1)
[  144.813911] NVMeVirt: nvmev_proc_io_0 started on cpu 7 (node 1)
[  144.813972] NVMeVirt: Successfully created Virtual NVMe device
[  144.814032] NVMeVirt: nvmev_dispatcher started on cpu 8 (node 1)
[  144.822075] nvme nvme0: 48/0/0 default/read/poll queues

If you encounter a kernel panic in __pci_enable_msix() or in nvme_hwmon_init() during insmod, it is because the current implementation of nvmevirt is not compatible with IOMMU. In this case, you can either turn off Intel VT-d or IOMMU in BIOS, or disable the interrupt remapping using the grub option as shown below:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="memmap=64G\\\$128G intremap=off"

Now the emulated nvmevirt device is ready to be used as shown below. The actual device number (/dev/nvme0) can vary depending on the number of real NVMe devices in your system.

$ ls -l /dev/nvme*
crw------- 1 root root 242, 0 Feb 22 14:13 /dev/nvme0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 5 Feb 22 14:13 /dev/nvme0n1

NVMeVirt is offered under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. More information about this license can be found here.

Priority queue implementation pqueue/ is offered under the terms of the BSD 2-clause license (GPL-compatible). (Copyright (c) 2014, Volkan Yazıcı [email protected]. All rights reserved.)