Re: Custom Hardware Acceleration

[Jon Mason <jdmason@us.ibm.com>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 12:52:29AM -0800, Jad Naous wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am exploring the possibility of designing a custom hardware 
> acceleration solution using an ASIC or an FPGA to accelerate some part 
> of Xen. Basically, I am looking for some part of the code that could be 
> built in hardware to make it faster. Does anybody know where I could get 
> some statistics on the code, such as the most called functions, the most 
> parallelizable functions, etc... If you could think of something that 
> would be useful in HW I would be very interested to know.
> Thanks,
> Jad.

You could make a custom NIC FPGA that can handle paravirtulized network
receive.  The NIC can inspect the destination MAC address of the incomming 
packet, and DMA it to a pre-alloced space in the domU (removing the need
for the page flip).  It will require modifing the xen network drivers,
but should be pretty cool.

Thanks,
Jon