SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Klaus Jensen
Senior Software Architect
Kalray
Rémy Gauguey is a Senior Software Architect at Kalray, for the Data Center Business Unit. He develops advanced architectures for composable infrastructure, leveraging the MPPA manycore technology from Kalray. Rémy has been previously developing his expertise at Connexant, Mindspeed Technologies and the CEA labs. He holds several patents in the fields of software architecture and packet processing.
Related Sessions
QEMU NVMe Emulation: What's New
The QEMU emulated NVMe device is used by developers and users alike to develop, test and verify device drivers and tools. The emulated device is in rapid development and with QEMU 6.0, the device was updated to support a number of core additional features such as an update to NVMe v1.4, universal Deallocated and Unwritten Logical Block Error support, enhanced PMR and CMB support as well as a number of experimental features such as Zoned Namespaces, multipath I/O, namespace sharing and DIF/DIX end-to-end data protection. The addition of these features allow users to test various configurations and developers to test device driver code paths that would normally not be easily exercised on generally available hardware. In this talk we present the implementation of these features and how they may be used to improve tooling and device drivers.
libvfn: A Low-level NVMe Application and VFIO Driver Framework
This talk presents the design and implementation of libvfn, a new open-source library for interacting with PCIe-based NVMe devices from user-space using VFIO. The core of the library is excessively low-level and aims to allow NVMe controller verification and testing teams to interact with devices at the register and queue level. While the library ships with a production ready NVMe driver with a high-level API, the library is designed to expose enough low-level VFIO functionality with which custom drivers can be implemented for any PCIe device as required by the application. We begin with a brief introduction to PCIe and NVMe in the context of VFIO-based user-space drivers, followed by a technical discussion on the implementation of the included NVMe driver. We discuss how the design and API differentiates itself from the current state of the art (i.e. the Storage Performance Development Kit) and how it enables interaction with advanced features of NVMe at the PCIe level. We end the technical part by showing how libvfn has been successfully integrated into existing projects with a case study on the "vfio" backend for the open-source xNVMe project. Finally, we wrap up by discussing performance and show that libvfn is on par with that of SPDK.