Re: [RFC 0/3] VirtIO RDMA

[Yuval Shaia <yuval.shaia@oracle.com>]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 05:24:08PM +0000, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 07:02:15PM +0200, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Apr 2019 14:01:54 +0300
> > Yuval Shaia <yuval.shaia@oracle.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Data center backends use more and more RDMA or RoCE devices and more and
> > > more software runs in virtualized environment.
> > > There is a need for a standard to enable RDMA/RoCE on Virtual Machines.
> > > 
> > > Virtio is the optimal solution since is the de-facto para-virtualizaton
> > > technology and also because the Virtio specification
> > > allows Hardware Vendors to support Virtio protocol natively in order to
> > > achieve bare metal performance.
> > > 
> > > This RFC is an effort to addresses challenges in defining the RDMA/RoCE
> > > Virtio Specification and a look forward on possible implementation
> > > techniques.
> > > 
> > > Open issues/Todo list:
> > > List is huge, this is only start point of the project.
> > > Anyway, here is one example of item in the list:
> > > - Multi VirtQ: Every QP has two rings and every CQ has one. This means that
> > >   in order to support for example 32K QPs we will need 64K VirtQ. Not sure
> > >   that this is reasonable so one option is to have one for all and
> > >   multiplex the traffic on it. This is not good approach as by design it
> > >   introducing an optional starvation. Another approach would be multi
> > >   queues and round-robin (for example) between them.
> > > 
> > > Expectations from this posting:
> > > In general, any comment is welcome, starting from hey, drop this as it is a
> > > very bad idea, to yeah, go ahead, we really want it.
> > > Idea here is that since it is not a minor effort i first want to know if
> > > there is some sort interest in the community for such device.
> > 
> > My first reaction is: Sounds sensible, but it would be good to have a
> > spec for this :)
> 
> I'm unclear why you'd want to have a virtio queue for anything other
> that some kind of command channel.
> 
> I'm not sure a QP or CQ benefits from this??

Virtqueue is a standard mechanism to pass data from guest to host. By
saying that - it really sounds like QP send and recv rings. So my thought
is to use a standard way for rings. As i've learned this is how it is used
by other virtio devices ex virtio-net.

> 
> Jason