Method and apparatus for enabling access to storage

摘要

When a guest OS loads within the context of a container provided by the host OS, the guest OS uses PCI or other protocol to specify a virtual hardware device. The guest OS enumerates the virtual hardware device to establish the size for the BARs and establish its view of physical addresses for the memory locations. A server running in the context of the container receives read/write requests from the guest OS, maps the read/write requests to host OS physical address space, and posts responses to the virtual hardware device. Since the guest OS executes memory related operations using its own memory space, exits to the container code are not required to implement storage related actions by the Guest OS. This allows performance of an application executing in the context of the guest OS to approximate performance of an application executing in the context of the host OS.

主权项

1. A method of enabling access to physical storage on a network storage system, the method comprising the steps of:
implementing a virtual hardware environment by a container thread executing on the network storage system; running a guest operating system in the virtual hardware environment; registering, by the guest operating system, a virtual storage device in the virtual hardware environment; and writing data to or reading data from the virtual storage device by the guest operating system to enable access to the physical storage on the network storage system without resorting to the container thread.