Open Stack

On 07/19/2016 06:51 PM, Ed Leafe wrote:
> On Jul 19, 2016, at 2:58 PM, Chris Friesen
> <chris.friesen at windriver.com> wrote:
>>> Why would a VM program the slot? Wouldn’t it usually be at the
>>> host level?
>>
>> Are there no cases where a VM might want to download a proprietary
>> program into an FPGA?
>
> That doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe I’m just not that familiar
> with FPGA specifics. In general, VMs don’t control their hosts.

Oh, but in NFV-land they most certainly do. :/

It's commonplace now to see NFV use cases where VMs are provided 
passthrough access to an SR-IOV physical function on the host and the 
VMs application code then controls and allocates at will virtual 
functions from that physical function. Once that happens, yes, it's true 
that Nova no longer has any clue about the resource usage of VFs on that 
host device -- it's essentially at that point totally up to the VNF 
software to properly manage and maintain access to those VFs and 
allocate/free resources as needed on the host device.

Same goes for FPGAs. VNF vendors want access to the physical host device 
and want to be able to do with that host device whatever they please.

As I wrote on Twitter recently, NFV is changing software-defined 
infrastructure to instead be hardware-defined software.

It's a funky new* world we live in, Ed :)

-jay

* new == old == new again.