What it is: vhost net is a character device that can be used to reduce
the number of system calls involved in virtio networking.
Existing virtio net code is used in the guest without modification.
There's similarity with vringfd, with some differences and reduced scope
- uses eventfd for signalling
- structures can be moved around in memory at any time (good for
migration, bug work-arounds in userspace)
- write logging is supported (good for migration)
- support memory table and not just an offset (needed for kvm)
common virtio related code has been put in a separate file vhost.c and
can be made into a separate module if/when more backends appear. I used
Rusty's lguest.c as the source for developing this part : this supplied
me with witty comments I wouldn't be able to write myself.
What it is not: vhost net is not a bus, and not a generic new system
call. No assumptions are made on how guest performs hypercalls.
Userspace hypervisors are supported as well as kvm.
How it works: Basically, we connect virtio frontend (configured by
userspace) to a backend. The backend could be a network device, or a tap
device. Backend is also configured by userspace, including vlan/mac
etc.
Status: This works for me, and I haven't see any crashes.
Compared to userspace, people reported improved latency (as I save up to
4 system calls per packet), as well as better bandwidth and CPU
utilization.
Features that I plan to look at in the future:
- mergeable buffers
- zero copy
- scalability tuning: figure out the best threading model to use
Note on RCU usage (this is also documented in vhost.h, near
private_pointer which is the value protected by this variant of RCU):
what is happening is that the rcu_dereference() is being used in a
workqueue item. The role of rcu_read_lock() is taken on by the start of
execution of the workqueue item, of rcu_read_unlock() by the end of
execution of the workqueue item, and of synchronize_rcu() by
flush_workqueue()/flush_work(). In the future we might need to apply
some gcc attribute or sparse annotation to the function passed to
INIT_WORK(). Paul's ack below is for this RCU usage.
(Includes fixes by Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>,
David L Stevens <dlstevens@us.ibm.com>,
Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>)
Acked-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Archs are free to use vcpu_id as they see fit. For x86 it is used as
vcpu's apic id. New ioctl is added to configure boot vcpu id that was
assumed to be 0 till now.
Signed-off-by: Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Since kvm-intel modue can't be built-in, make kvm depend on
CONFIG_MODULES.
Signed-off-by: Xiantao Zhang <xiantao.zhang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Two KVM archs support irqchips and two don't. Add a Kconfig item to
make selecting between the two models easier.
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
kvm/ia64 uses the virtio drivers to optimize its I/O subsytem.
Signed-off-by: Xiantao Zhang <xiantao.zhang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
Update the related Makefile and KConfig for kvm build
Signed-off-by: Xiantao Zhang <xiantao.zhang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
Linus Torvalds
Avi Kivity
Michael S. Tsirkin
Marcelo Tosatti
Gleb Natapov
Zhang, Xiantao
Avi Kivity