Emulation framework for Computational Storage using QEMU, SPDK, and libvfio-user.

Computational storage has emerged as a powerful solution for improving the performance and efficiency of compute systems by offloading computational tasks to storage devices. Emulating computational storage environments is crucial for software development, testing and benchmarking purposes before deploying such systems in production. This proposal presents an approach to emulate Computational Storage Drives(CSDs), Computational Storage Processor (CSPs) and Computational Storage Arrays (CSAs) using QEMU, SPDK, and libvfio-user. This framework supports both PCIe-based and network-based Computational Storage Devices and we will consider changes necessary to extend this to CXL-based devices.