Re: [virtio-dev] Re: VIRTIO - compatibility with different virtualization solutions

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:10:24AM +1030, Rusty Russell wrote:
> Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws> writes:
> > On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Rusty Russell <rusty@au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> >> On the other hand, if we wanted a more Xen-like setup, it would looke
> >> like this:
> >>
> >> 1) Abstract away the "physical addresses" to "handles" in the standard,
> >>    and allow some platform-specific mapping setup and teardown.
> >
> > At the risk of beating a dead horse, passing handles (grant
> > references) is going to be slow.
> ...
> > I really think the best paths forward for virtio on Xen are either (1)
> > reject the memory isolation thing and leave things as is or (2) assume
> > bounce buffering at the transport layer (by using the PCI DMA API).
> 
> Xen can get memory isolation back by doing the copy in the hypervisor.
> I've always liked that approach because it doesn't alter the guest
> semantics, but it's very different from what Xen does now.

It could. But why do it - the backend can choose it as well to do it
and perhaps even do some translation of the payload as it sees fit.

Or it can map it - and if using DPDK for example - one has
memory pages shared between the domains all the time - where you
just need to map once.

> 
> Cheers,
> Rusty.
>