Re: paravirtual drivers?

[Avi Kivity <avi-atKUWr5tajBWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org>]

Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
>>>
>>> What is the state of these PV drivers now? Is it usable on Linux now?
>>>   
>>
>> We (Qumranet) have Linux paravirtual network support working, but not 
>> ready for general consumption yet.
>
> Hmm, is the "general consumption" of the network support a matter of 
> weeks, or months rather?

Hopefully it will be included in kvm releases in a few weeks, but 
perhaps not as efficient as we'd like, and it would be without 
commitment to ABI stability (i.e. you may have to install a new guest 
driver after updating the host).

An ABI-stable driver will be available on a longer time frame.  We're 
still hashing out things like where the host-side driver belongs.  There 
are known performance issues with the current driver (though it's 
magnitudes better than the qemu devices).  I'm toying with the idea of 
sharing the Xen drivers.

> And what about the block device? As I understand, using SCSI emulation 
> gives better results, but still, there will be a noticeable difference 
> when compared to the "native speed".
>

We're not working on block devices at the moment, and I have no 
performance figures on scsi vs. ide vs. paravirt.


-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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