On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 10:29:08AM -0600, Gregory Haskins wrote: > >>> On 8/6/2009 at 11:40 AM, in message <200908061740.04276.arnd@xxxxxxxx>, Arnd > Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Thursday 06 August 2009, Gregory Haskins wrote: [ big snip ] > > > > 3. The ioq method seems to be the real core of your work that makes > > venet perform better than virtio-net with its virtqueues. I don't see > > any reason to doubt that your claim is correct. My conclusion from > > this would be to add support for ioq to virtio devices, alongside > > virtqueues, but to leave out the extra bus_type and probing method. > > While I appreciate the sentiment, I doubt that is actually whats helping here. > > There are a variety of factors that I poured into venet/vbus that I think contribute to its superior performance. However, the difference in the ring design I do not think is one if them. In fact, in many ways I think Rusty's design might turn out to be faster if put side by side because he was much more careful with cacheline alignment than I was. Also note that I was careful to not pick one ring vs the other ;) They both should work. IMO, the virtio vring design is very well thought out. I found it relatively easy to port to a host+blade setup, and run virtio-net over a physical PCI bus, connecting two physical CPUs. > > IMO, we are only looking at the tip of the iceberg when looking at this purely as the difference between virtio-pci vs virtio-vbus, or venet vs virtio-net. > > Really, the big thing I am working on here is the host side device-model. The idea here was to design a bus model that was conducive to high performance, software to software IO that would work in a variety of environments (that may or may not have PCI). KVM is one such environment, but I also have people looking at building other types of containers, and even physical systems (host+blade kind of setups). > > The idea is that the "connector" is modular, and then something like virtio-net or venet "just work": in kvm, in the userspace container, on the blade system. > > It provides a management infrastructure that (hopefully) makes sense for these different types of containers, regardless of whether they have PCI, QEMU, etc (e.g. things that are inherent to KVM, but not others). > > I hope this helps to clarify the project :) > I think this is the major benefit of vbus. I've only started studying the vbus code, so I don't have lots to say yet. The overview of the management interface makes it look pretty good. Getting two virtio-net drivers hooked together in my virtio-over-PCI patches was nasty. If you read the thread that followed, you'll see the lack of a management interface as a concern of mine. It was basically decided that it could come "later". The configfs interface vbus provides is pretty nice, IMO. Just my two cents, Ira -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
