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

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Apr 02 2009 - 07:59:56 EST


Gregory Haskins wrote:



Why does a kernel solution not need to know when a packet is transmitted?


You do not need to know when the packet is copied (which I currently
do). You only need it for zero-copy (of which I would like to support,
but as I understand it there are problems with the reliability of proper
callback (i.e. skb->destructor).

Its "fire and forget" :)

It's more of a "schedule and forget" which I think brings you the win. The host disables notifications and schedules the actual tx work (rx from the host's perspective). So now the guest and host continue producing and consuming packets in parallel. So long as the guest is faster (due to the host being throttled?), notifications continue to be disabled.

If you changed your rx_isr() to process the packets immediately instead of scheduling, I think throughput would drop dramatically.

Mark had a similar change for virtio. Mark?

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

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