Linux Makes Progress On Prepping NVMe-Over-Fabrics Support

Initial patches were published this week for adding initial NVMe-over-Fabrics support for the Linux kernel as set out by the NVMe 1.2b specification. This target implementation is the basics of making this new specification a reality and one of the first public implementations.

NVMe-over-Fabrics is a new standard for Non-Volatime Memory Express for enabling remote access of NVM Express storage devices over RDMA fabrics. This standard is designed to reduce multiple copies and make for more efficient data transfers across fabrics.

NVM Express over Fabrics is slated to yield much lower latency (some have said the goal is to have the same latency as if communicating locally to an NVMe device over PCI-E), simplicity, and a clean architecture. If you want to learn much more about NVMe over Fabrics, see these OpenFabrics.org slides from a conference last year going over the standard.

The patches published on Monday to the kernel mailing list wire up the Linux kernel for the NVMe target core, NVMe I/O command completion, the actual support over fabrics, the discovery service, and more. There is also the nvmetcli tool for taking care of the user-space side.

More details via this kernel mailing list thread.