Re: [Qemu-devel] [virtio-dev] Vhost-pci RFC2.0

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 11:42 AM, Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@intel.com> wrote:
> On 04/19/2017 05:57 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 06:38:11AM +0000, Wang, Wei W wrote:
>>>
>>> We made some design changes to the original vhost-pci design, and want to
>>> open
>>> a discussion about the latest design (labelled 2.0) and its extension
>>> (2.1).
>>> 2.0 design: One VM shares the entire memory of another VM
>>> 2.1 design: One VM uses an intermediate memory shared with another VM for
>>>                       packet transmission.
>>
>> Hi,
>> Can you talk a bit about the motivation for the 2.x design and major
>> changes compared to 1.x?
>
>
> 1.x refers to the design we presented at KVM Form before. The major
> change includes:
> 1) inter-VM notification support
> 2) TX engine and RX engine, which is the structure built in the driver. From
> the device point of view, the local rings of the engines need to be
> registered.

It would be great to support any virtio device type.

The use case I'm thinking of is networking and storage appliances in
cloud environments (e.g. OpenStack).  vhost-user doesn't fit nicely
because users may not be allowed to run host userspace processes.  VMs
are first-class objects in compute clouds.  It would be natural to
deploy networking and storage appliances as VMs using vhost-pci.

In order to achieve this vhost-pci needs to be a virtio transport and
not a virtio-net-specific PCI device.  It would extend the VIRTIO 1.x
spec alongside virtio-pci, virtio-mmio, and virtio-ccw.

When you say TX and RX I'm not sure if the design only supports
virtio-net devices?

> The motivation is to build a common design for 2.0 and 2.1.
>
>>
>> What is the relationship between 2.0 and 2.1?  Do you plan to upstream
>> both?
>
> 2.0 and 2.1 use different ways to share memory.
>
> 2.0: VM1 shares the entire memory of VM2, which achieves 0 copy
> between VMs while being less secure.
> 2.1: VM1 and VM2 use an intermediate shared memory to transmit
> packets, which results in 1 copy between VMs while being more secure.
>
> Yes, plan to upstream both. Since the difference is the way to share memory,
> I think it wouldn't have too many patches to upstream 2.1 if 2.0 is ready
> (or
> changing the order if needed).

Okay.  "Asymmetric" (vhost-pci <-> virtio-pci) and "symmetric"
(vhost-pci <-> vhost-pci) mode might be a clearer way to distinguish
between the two.  Or even "compatibility" mode and "native" mode since
existing guests only work in vhost-pci <-> virtio-pci mode.  Using
version numbers to describe two different modes of operation could be
confusing.

Stefan