Re: [Qemu-devel] "Using Python to investigate EFI and ACPI"

[josh@joshtriplett.org]

On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 01:21:57AM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 09/03/15 23:25, josh@joshtriplett.org wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 07:19:40PM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> 
> >> In any case, if what you need resembles a "general virtio filesystem",
> >> then please just use that -- a virtio-block or virtio-scsi disk, with a
> >> normal filesystem on it. The protocol is industry standard and the
> >> performance of the QEMU (and kernel) implementation is splendid.
> > 
> > Not at all what I'm looking for; I'm looking for a *filesystem*, like
> > virtio-9p, but with significantly better performance.  I agree that
> > starting from fw_cfg for that is probably a bad idea; it's more that if
> > a high-performance virtio filesystem existed, it might also work for
> > fw_cfg. :)
> 
> Thanks for mentioning "virtio-9p", now I remember what to point at
> instead of it. I recommend Stefan's slides from this year's KVM forum.
> 
> https://kvmforum2015.sched.org/event/bca50b64e0fbea734b855498f25d0753
> http://blog.vmsplice.net/2015/08/virtio-vsock-zero-configuration.html

Interesting!  While I'm not sure a network-style protocol is the right
one for a virtual filesystem, vsock certainly has the potential to
significantly improve performance and code cleanliness.

I'd hope, though, that a high-performance virtio filesystem could also
take advantage of the ability to directly mmap a file from outside the
VM into the VM's address space.

In any case, we're getting a bit far afield for the original thread. :)

- Josh Triplett