ZFS Hardware Acceleration with QAT

Talk by Weigang Li at OpenZFS Developer Summit 2018:

ZFS Hardware Acceleration with QAT

Hardware accelerator is playing more and more important role to offload the CPU intensive tasks in data center. There are many such kind of workloads in ZFS, for example, Compression, Encryption and Checksum, enabling the above features in ZFS normally means more CPU consumption and causes performance drop. Intel Quick Assist Technology (QAT) is a hardware accelerator to speed up the above workload, and recently it was integrated into ZFS On Linux (ZOL) since version 0.7.0.

In this talk we will go through our work for QAT enabling in ZOL, and get feedback from community, we will present how QAT helps ZFS improve performance by offloading the Compression (GZIP), Encryption (AES-GCM) and Checksum (SHA256) workloads, and we will also present the benchmark results.

The PRs for QAT enabling in ZOL are:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5846

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/7282

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/7295

The QAT documents and reference @:

https://01.org/intel-quickassist-technology