VNS: An Open-Source FPGA SmartNIC for SR-IOV Inter-VM Switching and Function Offload
Name
VNS_An_Open-Source_FPGA_SmartNIC_for_SR-IOV_Inter-VM_Switching_and_Function_Offload.pdf
Size
1.28 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8eb559c392a331ae2207a1398bbf0d8d
Author(s)
Lim, Jeffery
Herbordt, Martin
Date Issued
2026
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers | Proceedings of 30th Annual IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Virtual Conference
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Cloud providers rely on SmartNICs to offload networking, storage, and security functions from their hypervisors. Using technologies like single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), guests bypass the hypervisor to access I/O directly. This frees CPU cycles for tenant workloads, but removes the software virtual switch (e.g., Open vSwitch) that conventionally handles intra-node traffic. Support for SR-IOV remains rare among opensource NIC designs, limiting the research community's ability to develop SmartNICs that mirror how cloud providers operate. Recent work has begun to close this gap, but no open-source design provides the functions that a software virtual switch such as Open vSwitch would otherwise supply. Because SR-IOV bypasses the hypervisor, these functions must move into hardware. We present the Verilog Network Switch (VNS), an open-source hardware switching fabric that fills this gap for SR-IOV-capable NICs. VNS uses a flow table to redirect packets in hardware and an eBPF softcore engine to handle per-tenant firewall rules. Compared with a commercial SR-IOV NIC in a matched feature configuration, VNS delivers competitive throughput up to moderate firewall rule depths (0 to 64 rules) and outperforms it on 16rank all-to-all collectives by 10% to 13%. Beyond this range, the latency of the programmable FPGA data path becomes visible. VNS is intended as an open, reconfigurable research platform for studying and extending cloud-style SmartNIC designs, rather than a peak-throughput production NIC.
Subjects
Cloud Computing
Cloud Networking
Firewalls (computing)
Field Programmable Gate Arrays
Open-Source Hardware
Network Function Virtualization
SmartNIC
Software Defined Networking
MIT Department
Lincoln Laboratory
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