>From: Shirley Ma [mailto:mashirle@us.ibm.com]
>Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 6:31 AM
>To: Xin, Xiaohui
>Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org; kvm@vger.kernel.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
>mst@redhat.com; mingo@elte.hu; davem@davemloft.net; herbert@gondor.apana.org.au;
>jdike@linux.intel.com
>Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v8 00/16] Provide a zero-copy method on KVM virtio-net.
>
>Hello Xiaohui,
>
>On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 19:14 +0800,
xiaohui.xin@intel.com wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Since vhost-net already supports macvtap/tun backends, do you think
>whether it's better to implement zero copy in macvtap/tun than inducing
>a new media passthrough device here?
>
>> Our goal is to improve the bandwidth and reduce the CPU usage.
>> Exact performance data will be provided later.
>
>I did some vhost performance measurement over 10Gb ixgbe, and found that
>in order to get consistent BW results, netperf/netserver, qemu, vhost
>threads smp affinities are required.
>
>Looking forward to these results for small message size comparison. For
>large message size 10Gb ixgbe BW already reached by doing vhost smp
>affinity w/i offloading support, we will see how much CPU utilization it
>can be reduced.
>
>Please provide latency results as well. I did some experimental on
>macvtap zero copy sendmsg, what I have found that get_user_pages latency
>pretty high.
>
