Re: updated: kvm networking todo wiki

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws> writes:
>> Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> writes:
>>> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 08:47:58AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> FWIW, I think what's more interesting is using vhost-net as a networking
>>>> backend with virtio-net in QEMU being what's guest facing.
>>>>
>>>> In theory, this gives you the best of both worlds: QEMU acts as a first
>>>> line of defense against a malicious guest while still getting the
>>>> performance advantages of vhost-net (zero-copy).
>>>>
>>> It would be an interesting idea if we didn't already have the vhost
>>> model where we don't need the userspace bounce.
>>
>> The model is very interesting for QEMU because then we can use vhost as
>> a backend for other types of network adapters (like vmxnet3 or even
>> e1000).
>>
>> It also helps for things like fault tolerance where we need to be able
>> to control packet flow within QEMU.
>
> (CC's reduced, context added, Dmitry Fleytman added for vmxnet3 thoughts).
>
> Then I'm really confused as to what this would look like.  A zero copy
> sendmsg?  We should be able to implement that today.
>
> On the receive side, what can we do better than readv?  If we need to
> return to userspace to tell the guest that we've got a new packet, we
> don't win on latency.  We might reduce syscall overhead with a
> multi-dimensional readv to read multiple packets at once?

Sounds like recvmmsg(2).

Stefan