Re: [Qemu-devel] Hitting 29 NIC limit

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 10/14/2010 08:23 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
>  On 10/14/2010 02:54 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> The key is to make the virtio-net devices multifunction and to fill 
>>>> out all 8 functions for each slot.
>>>
>>> This is unlikely to work right wrt pci hotplug.
>>
>>
>> Yes.  Our hotplug design is based on devices..  This is wrong, it 
>> should be based on bus-level concepts (like PCI slots).
>>
>>> If we want to support a large number of interfaces, we need true 
>>> multiport cards.
>>
>> This magic here creates a multiport virtio-net card so I'm not really 
>> sure what you're suggesting.  It would certainly be nice to make this 
>> all more user friendly (and make hotplug work).
>>
>
> The big issue is to fix hotplug.

Yes, but this is entirely independent of multifunction devices.

Today we shoe-horn hot remove into device_del.  Instead, we should have 
explicit bus-level interfaces for hot remove.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> I don't see how we can make it user friendly, without making the 
> ordinary case even more unfriendly.  Looks like we need yet another 
> level of indirection here.
>