Re: [virtio-comment] [PROPOSAL] Virtio Over Fabrics(TCP/RDMA)

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>]

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On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 11:40:02AM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 7:31 PM zhenwei pi <pizhenwei@bytedance.com> wrote:
> > "Virtio Over Fabrics" aims at "reuse virtio device specifications", and
> > provides network defined peripheral devices.
> > And this protocol also could be used in virtualization environment,
> > typically hypervisor(or vhost-user process) handles request from virtio
> > PCI/MMIO/CCW, remaps request and forwards to target by fabrics.
> 
> This requires meditation in the datapath, isn't it?
> 
> >
> > - Protocol
> > The detail protocol definition see:
> > https://github.com/pizhenwei/linux/blob/virtio-of-github/include/uapi/linux/virtio_of.h
> 
> I'd say a RFC patch for virtio spec is more suitable than the codes.

VIRTIO over TCP has long been anticipated but so far no one posted an
implementation. There are probably mentions of it from 10+ years ago.
I'm excited to see this!

Both the VIRTIO spec and the Linux drivers provide an abstraction that
allows fabrics (e.g. TCP) to fit in as a VIRTIO Transport. vrings are
not the only way to implement virtqueues.

Many VIRTIO devices will work fine over a message passing transport like
TCP. A few devices like the balloon device may not make sense. Shared
Memory Regions won't work.

Please define VIRTIO over Fabrics as a Transport in the VIRTIO spec so
that the integration with the VIRTIO device model is seamless. I look
forward to discussing spec patches.

Stefan

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