Storage Performance Development Kit

SPDK Mailing List

SPDK on 01.org

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) provides a set of tools and libraries for writing high performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications. It achieves high performance by moving all of the necessary drivers into userspace and operating in a polled mode instead of relying on interrupts, which avoids kernel context switches and eliminates interrupt handling overhead.

The development kit currently includes:

• NVMe driver
• I/OAT (DMA engine) driver
• NVMe over Fabrics target
• iSCSI target

Documentation

Doxygen API documentation is available, as well as a Porting Guide for porting SPDK to different frameworks and operating systems.

Many examples are available in the examples directory.

Changelog

Prerequisites

To build SPDK, some dependencies must be installed.

Fedora/CentOS:

sudo dnf install -y gcc gcc-c++ CUnit-devel libaio-devel openssl-devel
# Additional dependencies for NVMe over Fabrics:
sudo dnf install -y libibverbs-devel librdmacm-devel

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install -y gcc g++ make libcunit1-dev libaio-dev libssl-dev
# Additional dependencies for NVMe over Fabrics:
sudo apt-get install -y libibverbs-dev librdmacm-dev

FreeBSD:

sudo pkg install gmake cunit openssl

Additionally, DPDK is required.

1) cd /path/to/spdk
2) wget http://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-17.02.tar.xz
3) tar xf dpdk-17.02.tar.xz

Linux:

4) (cd dpdk-17.02 && make install T=x86_64-native-linuxapp-gcc DESTDIR=.)

FreeBSD:

4) (cd dpdk-17.02 && gmake install T=x86_64-native-bsdapp-clang DESTDIR=.)

Build Configuration

Optional components and other build-time configuration are controlled by the CONFIG file in the root SPDK directory. CONFIG is a Makefile fragment that may be edited before building to control which options are enabled.

Boolean (on/off) options are configured with a 'y' (yes) or 'n' (no). For example, this line of CONFIG controls whether the optional RDMA (libibverbs) support is enabled:

CONFIG_RDMA?=n

To enable RDMA, this line of CONFIG may be modified to contain 'y' instead of 'n'.

Alternatively, CONFIG options may also be overrriden on the make command line:

make CONFIG_RDMA=y

The options specified on the make command line take precedence over the default values in CONFIG.

Building

Once the prerequisites are installed, run 'make' within the SPDK directory to build the SPDK libraries and examples. If you followed the instructions above for building DPDK:

Linux:

make DPDK_DIR=./dpdk-17.02/x86_64-native-linuxapp-gcc

FreeBSD:

gmake DPDK_DIR=./dpdk-17.02/x86_64-native-bsdapp-clang

Hugepages and Device Binding

Before running an SPDK application, some hugepages must be allocated and any NVMe and I/OAT devices must be unbound from the native kernel drivers. SPDK includes a script to automate this process on both Linux and FreeBSD. This script should be run as root.

sudo scripts/setup.sh

Examples

Example code is located in the examples directory. The examples are compiled automatically as part of the build process. Simply call any of the examples with no arguments to see the help output. You'll likely need to run the examples as a privileged user (root) unless you've done additional configuration to grant your user permission to allocate huge pages and map devices through vfio.