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:
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.
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. The SPDK repository includes a suitable version of DPDK as a submodule:
git submodule update --init
Once the prerequisites are installed, building follows the common configure and make pattern (note: this will build the DPDK submodule as well).
Linux:
./configure
make
FreeBSD:
./configure
gmake
A Vagrant setup is also provided to create a Linux VM with a virtual NVMe controller to get up and running quickly. Currently this has only been tested on MacOS and Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with the VirtualBox provider. The VirtualBox Extension Pack must also be installed in order to get the required NVMe support.
Details on the Vagrant setup can be found in scripts/vagrant/README.md.
Optional components and other build-time configuration are controlled by
settings in two Makefile fragments in the root of the repository. CONFIG
contains the base settings. Running the configure script generates a new
file, CONFIG.local, that contains overrides to the base CONFIG file. For
advanced configuration, there are a number of additional options to configure
that may be used, or CONFIG.local can simply be created and edited by hand. A
description of all possible options is located in CONFIG.
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 may be added to CONFIG.local with a 'y' instead of
'n'. For the majority of options this can be done using the configure script.
For example:
./configure --with-dpdk=./dpdk/x86_64-native-linuxapp-gcc --with-rdma
Additionally, CONFIG options may also be overrriden on the make command
line:
make CONFIG_RDMA=y
Users may wish to use a version of DPDK different from the submodule included in the SPDK repository. To specify an alternate DPDK installation, run configure with the --with-dpdk option. For example:
Linux:
./configure --with-dpdk=/path/to/dpdk/x86_64-native-linuxapp-gcc
make
FreeBSD:
./configure --with-dpdk=/path/to/dpdk/x86_64-native-bsdapp-clang
gmake
The options specified on the make command line take precedence over the
default values in CONFIG and CONFIG.local. This can be useful if you, for
example, generate a CONFIG.local using the configure script and then have
one or two options (i.e. debug builds) that you wish to turn on and off
frequently.
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
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.