[PATCH RFC 00/11] nvmet: Add NVMe target mdev/vfio driver

Mike Christie
2025-03-13T05:22:46Z

The following patches were made over Linus's tree. They implement
a virtual PCI NVMe device using mdev/vfio. The device can be used
by QEMU and in the guest will look like a normal old local PCI
NVMe drive.

They are based on Maxim Levitsky's mdev patches:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190506125752.GA5288@lst.de/t/

but instead of trying to export a physical NVMe device to a guest, they
are only focused on exporting a virtual device using the nvmet layer.

Why another driver when we have so many? Performance.
=====================================================
Without any tuning and major locks still in the main IO path, 4K IOPS for
a single controller with a single namespace are higher than the kernel
vhost-scsi driver and SPDK vhost-scsi/blk user when using lower number
of queues/cpus/jobs. At just 2 queues, we are able to hit 1M IOPS:

Note: the nvme mdev values below have the shadow doorbell enabled

mdev vhost-scsi vhost-scsi-usr vhost-blk-usr
numjobs
1 518K 198K 332K 301K
2 1037K 363K 609K 664K
4 974K 633K 1369K 1383K
8 813K 1788K 1358K 1363K

However, by default we can't scale. But, tuning mdev to pre-pin pages
(this requires patches to the vfio layer to support) then it also performs
better at lower and higher number of queues/cpus/jobs used with it
reaching 2.3M IOPS woth only 4 cpus/queues used:

mdev
numjobs
1 505K
2 1037K
4 2375K
8 2162K

If we agree on a new virtual NVMe driver being ok, why mdev vs vhost?
=====================================================================
The problem with a vhost nvme is:

2.1. If we do a fully vhost nvmet solution, it will require new guest
drivers that present NVMe interfaces to userspace then perform the
vhost spec on the backend like how vhost-scsi does.

I don't want to implement a windows or even a linux nvme vhost
driver. I don't think anyone wants the extra headache.

2.2. We can do a hybrid approach where in the guest it looks like we
are a normal old local NVMe drive and use the guest's native NVMe driver.
However in QEMU we would have a vhost nvme module that instead of using
vhost virtqueues handles virtual PCI memory accesses as well as a vhost
nvme kernel or user driver to process IO.

So not as much extra code as option 1 since we don't have to worry about
the guest but still extra QEMU code.

3. The mdev based solution does not have these drawbacks as it can
look like a normal old local NVMe drive to the guest and can use QEMU's
existing vfio layer. So it just requires the kernel driver.

Why not a new blk driver or why not vdpa blk?
=============================================
Applications want standardized interfaces for things like persistent
reservations. They have to support them with SCSI and NVMe already
and don't want to have to support a new virtio block interface.

Also the nvmet-mdev-pci driver in this patchset can perform was well
as SPDK vhost blk so that doesn't have the perf advantage like it
used to.

Status
======
This patchset is RFC quality only. You can discover a drive and do
IO but it's not stable. There's several TODO items mentioned in the
last patch. However, I think the patches are at the point where I
wanted to get some feedback about if this even acceptable because
the last time they were posted some people did not like how
they hooked into drivers/nvme/host (this has been fixed in this
posting). There's some other issues like:

1. Should the driver integrate with pci-epf (the drivers work very
differently but could share some code)?

2. Should it try to fit into the existing configfs interface or implement
it's own like how pci-epf did? I did an attempt for this but it feels
wrong.