On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 12:30:50AM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

Hi Ira,

quoted

Making my life harder since the last time I tried this, mainline commit
7c5e9ed0c (virtio_ring: remove a level of indirection) has removed the
possibility of using an alternative virtqueue implementation. The commit
message suggests that you might be willing to add this capability back.
Would this be an option?

Sorry about that.

With respect to this commit, we only had one implementation upstream
and extra levels of indirection made extending the API
much harder for no apparent benefit.

When there's more than one ring implementation with very small amount of
common code, I think that it might make sense to readd the indirection
back, to separate the code cleanly.

OTOH if the two implementations share a lot of code, I think that it
might be better to just add a couple of if statements here and there.
This way compiler even might have a chance to compile the code out if
the feature is disabled in kernel config.

The virtqueue implementation I envision will be almost identical to the
current virtio_ring virtqueue implementation, with the following
exceptions:

* the "shared memory" will actually be remote, on the PCI BAR of a device
* iowrite32(), ioread32() and friends will be needed to access the memory
* there will only be a fixed number of virtqueues available, due to PCI
  BAR size
* cross-endian virtqueues must work
* kick needs to be cross-machine (using PCI IRQ's)

I don't think it is feasible to add this to the existing implementation.
I think the requirement of being cross-endian will be the hardest to
overcome. Rusty did not envision the cross-endian use case when he
designed this, and it shows, in virtio_ring, virtio_net and vhost. I
have no idea what to do about this. Do you have any ideas?


I plan to create a custom socket similar to tun/macvtap which will use
DMA to transfer around data. This, along with a few other tricks, will
allow me to use vhost_net to operate the device. Along with a custom
virtqueue implementation meeting the requirements above, this seems like
a good plan.

Thanks for responding,
Ira