What it is: vhost net is a character device that can be used to reduce
the number of system calls involved in virtio networking.
Existing virtio net code is used in the guest without modification.
There's similarity with vringfd, with some differences and reduced scope
- uses eventfd for signalling
- structures can be moved around in memory at any time (good for
migration, bug work-arounds in userspace)
- write logging is supported (good for migration)
- support memory table and not just an offset (needed for kvm)
common virtio related code has been put in a separate file vhost.c and
can be made into a separate module if/when more backends appear. I used
Rusty's lguest.c as the source for developing this part : this supplied
me with witty comments I wouldn't be able to write myself.
What it is not: vhost net is not a bus, and not a generic new system
call. No assumptions are made on how guest performs hypercalls.
Userspace hypervisors are supported as well as kvm.
How it works: Basically, we connect virtio frontend (configured by
userspace) to a backend. The backend could be a network device, or a tap
device. Backend is also configured by userspace, including vlan/mac
etc.
Status: This works for me, and I haven't see any crashes.
Compared to userspace, people reported improved latency (as I save up to
4 system calls per packet), as well as better bandwidth and CPU
utilization.
Features that I plan to look at in the future:
- mergeable buffers
- zero copy
- scalability tuning: figure out the best threading model to use
Note on RCU usage (this is also documented in vhost.h, near
private_pointer which is the value protected by this variant of RCU):
what is happening is that the rcu_dereference() is being used in a
workqueue item. The role of rcu_read_lock() is taken on by the start of
execution of the workqueue item, of rcu_read_unlock() by the end of
execution of the workqueue item, and of synchronize_rcu() by
flush_workqueue()/flush_work(). In the future we might need to apply
some gcc attribute or sparse annotation to the function passed to
INIT_WORK(). Paul's ack below is for this RCU usage.
(Includes fixes by Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>,
David L Stevens <dlstevens@us.ibm.com>,
Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>)
Acked-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Now we have everything in place to be able to build KVM, so let's add it
as config option and in the Makefile.
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Two KVM archs support irqchips and two don't. Add a Kconfig item to
make selecting between the two models easier.
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Existing KVM statistics are either just counters (kvm_stat) reported for
KVM generally or trace based aproaches like kvm_trace.
For KVM on powerpc we had the need to track the timings of the different exit
types. While this could be achieved parsing data created with a kvm_trace
extension this adds too much overhead (at least on embedded PowerPC) slowing
down the workloads we wanted to measure.
Therefore this patch adds a in-kernel exit timing statistic to the powerpc kvm
code. These statistic is available per vm&vcpu under the kvm debugfs directory.
As this statistic is low, but still some overhead it can be enabled via a
.config entry and should be off by default.
Since this patch touched all powerpc kvm_stat code anyway this code is now
merged and simplified together with the exit timing statistic code (still
working with exit timing disabled in .config).
Signed-off-by: Christian Ehrhardt <ehrhardt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Make sure that CONFIG_KVM cannot be selected without processor support
(currently, 440 is the only processor implementation available).
Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
This introduces a set of core-provided hooks. For 440, some of these are
implemented by booke.c, with the rest in (the new) 44x.c.
Note that these hooks are link-time, not run-time. Since it is not possible to
build a single kernel for both e500 and 440 (for example), using function
pointers would only add overhead.
Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
The division was somewhat artificial and cumbersome, and had no functional
benefit anyways: we can only guests built for the real host processor.
Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
This patch enables KVM_TRACE to build for PowerPC arch. This means just
adding sections to Kconfig and Makefile.
Signed-off-by: Jerone Young <jyoung5@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Ehrhardt <ehrhardt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
This functionality is definitely experimental, but is capable of running
unmodified PowerPC 440 Linux kernels as guests on a PowerPC 440 host. (Only
tested with 440EP "Bamboo" guests so far, but with appropriate userspace
support other SoC/board combinations should work.)
See Documentation/powerpc/kvm_440.txt for technical details.
[stephen: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
