OPERATING SYSTEM VIRTUALIZATION FOR HOST CHANNEL ADAPTERS

• US 20150058851A1
• Filed: 09/30/2014
• Published: 02/26/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 07/22/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Globalfoundries US Incorporated (GlobalFoundries, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Stevens, Jerry W., Isrel, Maurice, Schmidt, Donald William, Kassimis, Constantinos
• Granted Patent: US 9,542,214 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45595 Network integration; Enabling network access in virtual machine instances
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45545 Guest-host, i.e. hypervisor is an application program itself, e.g. VirtualBox
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4555 Para-virtualisation, i.e. guest operating system has to be modified
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects

Abstract

A host information handling system (IHS) provides virtualization of host channel adapters (HCAs). A hypervisor partitions a system memory of the host IHS into multiple logical partitions (LPARs). A particular LPAR includes a single instance of an operating system. The single instance of the operating system includes a common layer that provides virtualization of physical HCAs and sharing of the physical HCAs by multiple virtual HCAs.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

partitioning a memory of a host information handling system (IHS) into a plurality of logical partitions (LPARs) including a particular LPAR, the host IHS including a plurality of physical host channel adapters (HCAs); and

providing a single instance of an operating system to the particular LPAR, the single instance of the operating system including a common layer that provides virtualization of the physical HCAs and sharing of the physical HCAs by multiple virtual HCAs.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein multiple virtual HCAs share a particular physical HCA.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

generating a request, by a user of the particular LPAR, for a physical HCA;

intercepting the request by the common layer; and

forwarding the request, by the common layer, to a virtual HCA that is isolated from other users of the particular LPAR.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the user of the particular LPAR is a TCP/IP stack.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the common layer provides host channel adapter services.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the common layer is an RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) layer.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing a respective virtual MAC address and global identifier (GID) to each user for each physical HCA of the single logical partition.