R&D: NVMe-Over-RPMsg Virtual Storage Device Model Applied to Heterogeneous Multi-Core SoCs

IEEE Xplore has published, in 2020 10th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC) proceedings,an article written by Xiaohao Zhang, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institude of Technology ,Beijing, China, Yunjie Li, and Gang Chen, Beijing Institute of Technology, Chongqing Innovation Center, Beijing Institude of Technology, Chongqing, China.

Abstract: “In order to implement huge data storage of high performance in embedded environment, more and more SSDs with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) standard are deployed and virtualized on heterogeneous multi-core platforms. Existing solutions of emulating NVMe SSD between guest operating system (OS) and remote OS rely on virtual machines (VMs), which bring in long I/O latency due to their expensive context switch and extra data transfer. In this paper, we propose NVMe over remote processor messaging (NVMe-over-RPMsg), a software framework that emulates remote storage system as local NVMe device, without requiring VMs. We implemented a prototype using ZCU102 FPGA board. The evaluation results show that NVMe-over-RPMsg has 45.4% reduction in latency and 1.74X improvement in throughput than native QEMU solution.“