Multi-tenancy is essential for unleashing SmartNIC's potential in datacenters. Our systematic analysis in this work shows that existing on-path SmartNICs have resource multiplexing limitations. For example, existing solutions lack multi-tenancy capabilities such as performance isolation and QoS provisioning for compute and IO resources. Compared to standard NIC data paths with a well-defined set of offloaded functions, unpredictable execution times of SmartNIC kernels make conventional approaches for multi-tenancy and QoS insufficient. We fill this gap with OSMOSIS, a SmartNICs resource manager co-design. OSMOSIS extends existing OS mechanisms to enable dynamic hardware resource multiplexing on top of the on-path packet processing data plane. We implement OSMOSIS within an open-source RISC-V-based 400Gbit/s SmartNIC. Our performance results demonstrate that OSMOSIS fully supports multi-tenancy and enables broader adoption of SmartNICs in datacenters with low overhead.

翻译：多租户是释放数据中心智能网卡潜力的关键。本文通过系统性分析表明，现有路径内智能网卡存在资源复用限制——例如，当前方案缺乏面向计算与IO资源的性能隔离及QoS保障等多租户能力。相较于具备明确定义卸载功能集的传统网卡数据通路，智能网卡内核的执行时间不可预测，导致传统的多租户与QoS方案难以适用。为此，我们提出OSMOSIS——一种智能网卡资源管理器协同设计方案。OSMOSIS扩展现有操作系统机制，在路径内数据包处理数据平面上实现动态硬件资源复用。我们在基于开源RISC-V架构的400Gbit/s智能网卡上完成OSMOSIS实现。性能测试结果表明，OSMOSIS能完全支持多租户特性，并以低开销推动智能网卡在数据中心的广泛采用。