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>
Introduce user_mode to replace the two variables switch_amode and
s390_noexec. There are three valid combinations of the old values:
1) switch_amode == 0 && s390_noexec == 0
2) switch_amode == 1 && s390_noexec == 0
3) switch_amode == 1 && s390_noexec == 1
They get replaced by
1) user_mode == HOME_SPACE_MODE
2) user_mode == PRIMARY_SPACE_MODE
3) user_mode == SECONDARY_SPACE_MODE
The new kernel parameter user_mode=[primary,secondary,home] lets
you choose the address space mode the user space processes should
use. In addition the CONFIG_S390_SWITCH_AMODE config option
is removed.
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
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>
From: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
This patch fixes a bug with cpu bound guest on kvm-s390. Sometimes it
was impossible to deliver a signal to a spinning guest. We used
preemption as a circumvention. The preemption notifiers called
vcpu_load, which checked for pending signals and triggered a host
intercept. But even with preemption, a sigkill was not delivered
immediately.
This patch changes the low level host interrupt handler to check for the
SIE instruction, if TIF_WORK is set. In that case we change the
instruction pointer of the return PSW to rerun the vcpu_run loop. The kvm
code sees an intercept reason 0 if that happens. This patch adds accounting
for these types of intercept as well.
The advantages:
- works with and without preemption
- signals are delivered immediately
- much better host latencies without preemption
Acked-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
This patch adds the virtualization submenu and the kvm option to the kernel
config. It also defines HAVE_KVM for 64bit kernels.
Acked-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com>
