RE: [Patch v5 0/3] Introduce a driver to support host accelerated access to Microsoft Azure Blob for Azure VM

[Long Li]

> Subject: Re: [Patch v5 0/3] Introduce a driver to support host accelerated
> access to Microsoft Azure Blob for Azure VM
> 
> On 8/5/21 12:00 AM, longli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > From: Long Li <longli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Azure Blob storage [1] is Microsoft's object storage solution for the
> > cloud. Users or client applications can access objects in Blob storage
> > via HTTP, from anywhere in the world. Objects in Blob storage are
> > accessible via the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure
> > CLI, or an Azure Storage client library. The Blob storage interface is
> > not designed to be a POSIX compliant interface.
> >
> > Problem: When a client accesses Blob storage via HTTP, it must go
> > through the Blob storage boundary of Azure and get to the storage
> > server through multiple servers. This is also true for an Azure VM.
> >
> > Solution: For an Azure VM, the Blob storage access can be accelerated
> > by having Azure host execute the Blob storage requests to the backend
> > storage server directly.
> >
> > This driver implements a VSC (Virtual Service Client) for accelerating
> > Blob storage access for an Azure VM by communicating with a VSP
> > (Virtual Service
> > Provider) on the Azure host. Instead of using HTTP to access the Blob
> > storage, an Azure VM passes the Blob storage request to the VSP on the
> > Azure host. The Azure host uses its native network to perform Blob
> > storage requests to the backend server directly.
> >
> > This driver doesn't implement Blob storage APIs. It acts as a fast
> > channel to pass user-mode Blob storage requests to the Azure host. The
> > user-mode program using this driver implements Blob storage APIs and
> > packages the Blob storage request as structured data to VSC. The
> > request data is modeled as three user provided buffers (request,
> > response and data buffers), that are patterned on the HTTP model used
> > by existing Azure Blob clients. The VSC passes those buffers to VSP for Blob
> storage requests.
> >
> > The driver optimizes Blob storage access for an Azure VM in two ways:
> >
> > 1. The Blob storage requests are performed by the Azure host to the
> > Azure Blob backend storage server directly.
> >
> > 2. It allows the Azure host to use transport technologies (e.g. RDMA)
> > available to the Azure host but not available to the VM, to reach to
> > Azure Blob backend servers.
> >
> > Test results using this driver for an Azure VM:
> > 100 Blob clients running on an Azure VM, each reading 100GB Block Blobs.
> > (10 TB total read data)
> > With REST API over HTTP: 94.4 mins
> > Using this driver: 72.5 mins
> > Performance (measured in throughput) gain: 30%.
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs
> > .microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fazure%2Fstorage%2Fblobs%2Fstorage-blobs-
> intro
> >
> duction&amp;data=04%7C01%7Clongli%40microsoft.com%7C6ba60a78f4e74
> aeb0b
> >
> b108d95833bf53%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C6376
> 378015
> >
> 92577579%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoi
> V2luMzIiL
> >
> CJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&amp;sdata=ab5Zl2cQdmUhdT3l
> SotDwMl
> > DQuE0JaY%2B1REPQ0%2FjXa4%3D&amp;reserved=0
> 
> Is the ioctl interface the only user space interface provided by this kernel
> driver? If so, why has this code been implemented as a kernel driver instead
> of e.g. a user space library that uses vfio to interact with a PCIe device? As an
> example, Qemu supports many different virtio device types.

The Hyper-V presents one such device for the whole VM. This device is used by all processes on the VM. (The test benchmark used 100 processes)

Hyper-V doesn't support creating one device for each process. We cannot use VFIO in this model.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Bart.