LeapIO: Efficient and Portable Virtual NVMe Storage on ARM SoCs

Abstract

ARM-based SmartNICs and SmartSSDs are increasingly popular in datacenters for their power efficiency and programmability. However, efficiently virtualizing NVMe storage on these ARM SoCs remains challenging. We present LeapIO, a system that provides efficient and portable virtual NVMe storage on ARM SoCs. LeapIO achieves near-native performance through novel techniques including bypass-based I/O virtualization, adaptive polling, and hardware-aware optimizations. Our evaluation shows that LeapIO achieves up to 95% of native storage performance while providing full virtualization capabilities.