[PATCH v1 0/3] Provide a zero-copy method on KVM virtio-net.

From: xiaohui . xin
Date: Sat Mar 06 2010 - 04:38:19 EST


The idea is simple, just to pin the guest VM user space and then
let host NIC driver has the chance to directly DMA to it.
The patches are based on vhost-net backend driver. We add a device
which provides proto_ops as sendmsg/recvmsg to vhost-net to
send/recv directly to/from the NIC driver. KVM guest who use the
vhost-net backend may bind any ethX interface in the host side to
get copyless data transfer thru guest virtio-net frontend.

We provide multiple submits and asynchronous notifiicaton to
vhost-net too.

Our goal is to improve the bandwidth and reduce the CPU usage.
Exact performance data will be provided later. But for simple
test with netperf, we found bindwidth up and CPU % up too,
but the bindwidth up ratio is much more than CPU % up ratio.

What we have not done yet:
packet split support
To support GRO
Performance tuning

what we have done in v1:
polish the RCU usage
deal with write logging in asynchroush mode in vhost
add notifier block for mp device
rename page_ctor to mp_port in netdevice.h to make it looks generic
add mp_dev_change_flags() for mp device to change NIC state
add CONIFG_VHOST_MPASSTHRU to limit the usage when module is not load
a small fix for missing dev_put when fail
using dynamic minor instead of static minor number
a __KERNEL__ protect to mp_get_sock()

performance:
using netperf with GSO/TSO disabled, 10G NIC,
disabled packet split mode, with raw socket case compared to vhost.

bindwidth will be from 1.1Gbps to 1.7Gbps
CPU % from 120%-140% to 140%-160%
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