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DPFS - DPU-Powered File System Virtualization framework

The DPFS framework allows Cloud and datacenter operators to provide virtualized file system services to tenants using DPU-offloading. With DPFS the complete file system implementation runs on the CPU complex of the DPU. Tenants consume the file system through the virtio-fs device that the DPU exposes over PCIe (multi-tenancy via SR-IOV). DPFS provides a hardware abstraction layer, FUSE API implementation and several file system implementations.

Warning: DPFS is currently a research project, its code is therefore not battle-tested, nor very clean. Use at your discretion.

Research Publications

Design and implementation

DPU virtio-fs architecture diagram

Modules

dpfs_hal

Front-end and hardware abstraction layer for the virtio-fs emulation layer of the DPU hardware. Currently only supports the Nvidia BlueField-2, support for other vendors is in the works. We have worked together with other DPU vendors to make sure our framework architecture/API is compatible with future virtio-fs support for other DPUs.

dpfs_fuse

Provides a lowlevel FUSE API (close-ish compatible fork of libfuse/fuse_lowlevel.h) over the raw buffers that DPUlib provides the user, using dpfs_hal. If you are building a DPU file system, use this library.

dpfs_nfs

Reflects a NFS folder with the asynchronous userspace NFS library libnfs by implementing the lowlevel FUSE API in dpfs_hal. The full NFS connect handshake (RPC connect, setting clientid and resolving the filehandle of the export path) is currently implemented asynchronously, so wait for dpfs_fuse to report that the handshake is done before starting a workload!

The NFS server needs to support NFS 4.1 or greater! Since the current release version of libnfs does not fully implement NFS 4.1 yet (+ no polling timeout), this new version of libnfs is needed, which implements the missing functionality we need.

dpfs_kv

Reflects the contents of a RAMCloud cluster as a flat root directory to the host machine. The key is the name of the file in the root directory and the value is the contents (4k max file size) of the file. This backend is optimized for low latency for many small files through RDMA.

dpfs_aio

Reflects the contents of a file system that is mounted locally on the DPU, metadata operations are synchronous and R/W I/O are asynchronously performed using libaio

dpfs_uring

Same as dpfs_aio but the R/W I/O uses io_uring. See the conf_example.toml for extra io_uring options.

list_emulation_managers

Standalone program to find out which RDMA devices have emulation capabilities

Usage on the Nvidia BlueField-2

The Nvidia SNAP library that is needed to run on BlueField-2 (only DPU currently supported) is closed source and does require a patch to enable asynchronous request completion. Using virtio-fs in SNAP is currently only possible with a prototype firmware and some alterations to the SNAP library. You can reach out to us on how to integrate DPFS and SNAP.

The steps to setup the DPU:

  • Install BFOS DOCA 3.9.3 (Ubuntu 20.04), newer versions might very well work. All the following steps are on the DPU.
  • Uncomment the first deb-src from /etc/apt/sources.list and execute sudo apt update; sudo apt build-dep linux.
  • Upgrade all the packages using apt, except for all the Open vSwitch packages via apt hold (currently the latest release is broken on the BF2).
  • Download MLNX OFED v23.04-1.1.3.0 (latest that we tested) on DPU, and add it as an apt repository (see these docs).
  • Only install mlnx-ofed-kernel-only using apt.
  • Clone the Linux source and checkout to v6.2 (the latest stable tag).
  • Copy the /boot/config file of the most recent kernel to linux/.config, and enable all MLX drivers, and other drivers you might want (e.g. Ceph). The config we used for the thesis experiments can be found in linux_patches/.
  • Compile Linux using make bindeb-pkg -j 7 and install the image, headers and libc using dpkg.
  • Reboot the DPU and confirm via ip addr that the ovs bridges are all there.
  • Flash the prototype firmware using mlxburn

Why all this pain to upgrade the Linux kernel? Because by default the BlueField OS runs Linux 5.4 that was released on 24 November 2019.... Newer kernel versions (6.2 in this case) improve networking, io_uring, etc performance. And this allows you to get kernel modules that are not by default in BF OS, such as Ceph. But DPFS should fully work on Linux 5.4 as well

With the above in mind, the steps needed to run DPFS on the BlueField-2:

  • Install the following deps on the DPU: autoconf cmake binutils libtool libck-dev libboost-thread-dev numactl
  • Patch SNAP to add a virtio-fs device type called "virtiofs_emu"
  • Patch SNAP to support asynchronous completion of virtio-fs requests (needs to be concurrency-safe)
  • Integrate DPFS into the build system of SNAP
  • Enable virtio-fs emulation in the DPU firmware with atleast one physical function (PF) for virtio-fs, and reboot the DPU
  • Determine the RDMA device that has virtio-fs emulation capabilities by running list_emulation_managers
  • Use one of the file system implementations by configuring DPFS through the toml configuration file (see conf_example.toml)

Setup steps for the extern dependencies:

  • Inside DPFS git submodule init; git submodule update --init --recursive
  • Inside extern/eRPC-arm cmake . -DPERF=on -DTRANSPORT=infiniband -DROCE=on; make -j
  • Inside extern/libnfs ./bootstrap; CFLAGS=-O3 ./configure --enable-pthread; make -j; sudo make install; sudo rm /etc/ld.so.cache; sudo ldconfig

Project status

See the Github issues and milestones.

FAQ

What is a 'DPU'?

A DPU (Data Processing Unit), for the scope and definition of this project, contains a CPU (running e.g. Linux), NIC and programmable data acceleration engines. It is also commonly referred to as SmartNIC or IPU (Infrastructure Processing Unit).

DPUs are shaping up to be(come) the center of virtualization in the Cloud. By offloading cloud operator services such as storage, networking and cloud orchestration to the DPU, the load on the host CPU is reduced, cloud operators have more control over their services (for upgrades and performance optimizations) and bare metal tenants are easier to support.

What is virtio-fs?

Virtio is an abstraction layer for virtualized environments to expose virtual PCIe hardware to guest VMs. Virtio-fs is one of these virtual PCIe hardware specifications. It employs the FUSE protocol (only the communication protocol!) to provide a filesystem to guest VMs. There are now DPUs comming out on the market that have support for hardware-accelerated virtio-fs emulation. Thereby having a real hardware device implement the virtual filesystem layer of virtio. We are using the Nvidia BlueField-2 which has support for virtio-fs emulation using Nvidia SNAP (Currently only available as a limited technical feature preview).

Contact and Credits

  • 🇨🇭 Hybrid Cloud / Infrastructure Software group at IBM Research Zurich
  • 🇳🇱 StoNet-research at VU Amsterdam

For contact about DPFS and the research we are conducting please reach out to: Peter.Jan.Gootzen at ibm d0t c0m. If you are a DPU-vendor looking into support file system offloading on your DPU, we would be happy to help with porting DPFS to your hardware.