Douglas Freimuth et al
IBM and Hewlett-Packard

The computing industry is undergoing rapid technological advances in IO virtualization. These advances are contributing to the delivery of robust, efficient virtualization functions that are being implemented in a combination of software, firmware, platform chip set, and devices (both hardware and firmware), in many areas of computing. Furthermore, plotting the progression of virtualization function deployment in the industry and projecting out three to four years, it appears possible for the industry to provide a Native IO virtualization mechanism that achieves or approaches the performance of a dedicated IO device. This paper describes the various approaches for providing PCI IO Virtualization and then focuses on the Native IO Virtualization of PCI devices.