From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jad Naous Subject: Re: Custom Hardware Acceleration Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 12:41:47 -0800 Message-ID: <43DE7A0B.90609@stanford.edu> References: <43D88DCD.4050006@stanford.edu> <20060126204802.GF17021@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20060126204802.GF17021@us.ibm.com> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Jon Mason , xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Jon Mason wrote: > On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 12:52:29AM -0800, Jad Naous wrote: >> Hi all, >> I am exploring the possibility of designing a custom hardware >> acceleration solution using an ASIC or an FPGA to accelerate some part >> of Xen. Basically, I am looking for some part of the code that could be >> built in hardware to make it faster. Does anybody know where I could get >> some statistics on the code, such as the most called functions, the most >> parallelizable functions, etc... If you could think of something that >> would be useful in HW I would be very interested to know. >> Thanks, >> Jad. > > You could make a custom NIC FPGA that can handle paravirtulized network > receive. The NIC can inspect the destination MAC address of the incomming > packet, and DMA it to a pre-alloced space in the domU (removing the need > for the page flip). It will require modifing the xen network drivers, > but should be pretty cool. > > Thanks, > Jon Just wanted to update that we are going to implement the paravirtualized NIC on an FPGA, and see if you guys can suggest where to start. We have never done any XEN development. The implementation should be done by the end of March. Are there any suggestions on how to make our FPGA implementation as portable as possible to other boards? The problem is we might end up using some IP cores for our implementation. If we have time, we'd get rid of those. Thanks, Jad.