summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/src/spdk/doc/about.md
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 18:45:59 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 18:45:59 +0000
commit19fcec84d8d7d21e796c7624e521b60d28ee21ed (patch)
tree42d26aa27d1e3f7c0b8bd3fd14e7d7082f5008dc /src/spdk/doc/about.md
parentInitial commit. (diff)
downloadceph-19fcec84d8d7d21e796c7624e521b60d28ee21ed.tar.xz
ceph-19fcec84d8d7d21e796c7624e521b60d28ee21ed.zip
Adding upstream version 16.2.11+ds.upstream/16.2.11+dsupstream
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'src/spdk/doc/about.md')
-rw-r--r--src/spdk/doc/about.md36
1 files changed, 36 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/src/spdk/doc/about.md b/src/spdk/doc/about.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6e73cd551
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/spdk/doc/about.md
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+# What is SPDK {#about}
+
+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 through the use of a number of key
+techniques:
+
+* Moving all of the necessary drivers into userspace, which avoids syscalls
+ and enables zero-copy access from the application.
+* Polling hardware for completions instead of relying on interrupts, which
+ lowers both total latency and latency variance.
+* Avoiding all locks in the I/O path, instead relying on message passing.
+
+The bedrock of SPDK is a user space, polled-mode, asynchronous, lockless
+[NVMe](http://www.nvmexpress.org) driver. This provides zero-copy, highly
+parallel access directly to an SSD from a user space application. The driver is
+written as a C library with a single public header. See @ref nvme for more
+details.
+
+SPDK further provides a full block stack as a user space library that performs
+many of the same operations as a block stack in an operating system. This
+includes unifying the interface between disparate storage devices, queueing to
+handle conditions such as out of memory or I/O hangs, and logical volume
+management. See @ref bdev for more information.
+
+Finally, SPDK provides
+[NVMe-oF](http://www.nvmexpress.org/nvm-express-over-fabrics-specification-released),
+[iSCSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI), and
+[vhost](http://blog.vmsplice.net/2011/09/qemu-internals-vhost-architecture.html)
+servers built on top of these components that are capable of serving disks over
+the network or to other processes. The standard Linux kernel initiators for
+NVMe-oF and iSCSI interoperate with these targets, as well as QEMU with vhost.
+These servers can be up to an order of magnitude more CPU efficient than other
+implementations. These targets can be used as examples of how to implement a
+high performance storage target, or used as the basis for production
+deployments.