Re: [RFC PATCH 00/17] virtual-bus

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Apr 02 2009 - 07:48:46 EST


Gregory Haskins wrote:



There is no choice. Exiting from the guest to the kernel to userspace
is prohibitively expensive, you can't do that on every packet.


Now you are making my point ;) This is part of the cost of your
signaling path, and it directly adds to your latency time.

It adds a microsecond. The kvm overhead of putting things in userspace is low enough, I don't know why people keep mentioning it. The problem is the kernel/user networking interfaces.

You can't
buffer packets here if the guest is only going to send one and wait for
a response and expect that to perform well. And this is precisely what
drove me to look at avoiding going back to userspace in the first place.

We're not buffering any packets. What we lack is a way to tell the guest that we're done processing all packets in the ring (IOW, re-enable notifications).

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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