[not sure if it was intentional, but you dropped the CC list. Therefore, I didn't see this until I caught up on my kvm@vger reading] Pantelis Koukousoulas wrote: > How hard would it be to implement virtio over vbus and perhaps the > virtio-net backend? It should be relatively trivial. I have already written the transport (called virtio-vbus) that would allow the existing front-end (virtio-net) to work without modification. http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/4/21/427 All that is needed is to take venet-tap as an example and port it to something virtio compatible (via that patch I posted) on the backend. I have proposed this as an alternative to venet, but so far I have not had any takers to help with this effort. Likewise, I am too busy with the infrastructure to take this on myself. > > This would leave only one variable in the comparison, clear misconceptions and > make evaluation easier by judging each of vbus, venet etc separately on its own > merits. > > The way things are now, it is unclear exactly where those performance > improvements are coming from (or how much each component contributes) > because there are too many variables. > > Replacing virtio-net by venet would be a hard proposition if only because > virtio-net has (closed source) windows drivers available. There has to be > shown that venet by itself does something significantly better that > virtio-net can't be modified to do comparably well. I am not proposing anyone replace virtio-net. It will continue to work fine despite the existence of an alternative, and KVM can continue to standardize on it if that is what KVM wants to do. > > Having venet in addition to virtio-net is also difficult, given that having only > one set of paravirtual drivers in the kernel was the whole point behind virtio. As it stands right now, virtio-net fails to meet my performance goals, and venet meets them (or at least, gets much closer, but I will not rest..). So, at least for AlacrityVM, I will continue to use and promote it when performance matters. If at some time in the future I can get virtio-net to work in my environment in a comparable and satisfactory way, I will consider migrating to it and deprecating venet. Until then, having two drivers is ok, and no-one has to use the one they don't like. I certainly do not think having more than one driver that speaks 802.x ethernet in the kernel tree is without precedent. ;) Kind Regards, -Greg
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