ZOC: Elastic and Cost-Efficient Virtual SmartNIC Architecture for Cloud Physical Machines
summary
ZOC implements a software-defined virtual SmartNIC by combining a passthrough NIC with a dedicated service VM that traps MMIO to an IO proxy, uses a virtual bus and an intermediate IO link, and relies on two-level DMA page tables and posted interrupts to avoid VM exits. Evaluation on a Mellanox ConnectX-5 vs a BlueField-3 PCIe DPU shows 6M pps at 69% of BF3 cost, >1M IOPS for storage, 1.72 million CPS (3.6× BF3) and 4× session capacity; zero‑cost mode reduces throughput but preserves tail latency; deployed successfully in production.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00ZOC virtual SmartNIC intro
- 1:42Challenges of relying solely on DPUs in production clouds
- 4:14ZOC insights and opportunities
- 5:21ZOC architecture overview
- 6:25Service VM design
- 7:28Control plane workflow
- 8:10Data plane DMA transfers
- 9:59Experiment setup and costs
- 10:42Cost and performance results
- 12:52Zero-cost mode evaluation
- 13:59ZOC compatibility
- 15:21ZOC contributions and future
- 16:24Q&A
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