[libvirt] Re: Supporting vhost-net and macvtap in libvirt for QEMU

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 07:28:00AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>The more interesting invocation of vhost-net though is one where the 
> >>vhost-net device backs directly to a physical network card.  In this 
> >>mode, vhost should get considerably better performance than the current 
> >>implementation.  I don't know the syntax yet, but I think it's 
> >>reasonable to assume that it will look something like -net 
> >>tap,dev=eth0.   The effect will be that eth0 is dedicated to the guest.
> >>    
> >
> >Ok, so in this model you have to create a dedicated ethXX device for
> >every guest, no sharing ?
> >  
> 
> Yup.  You may be sharing a physical network device via SR-IOV, but from 
> libvirt's perspective, we're dedicating a physical device to a guest 
> virtual nic.
> 
> >>I think there are a few ways libvirt could support vhost-net in this 
> >>second mode.  The simplest would be to introduce a new tag similar to 
> >><source network='br0'>.  In fact, if you probed the device type for the 
> >>network parameter, you could probably do something like <source 
> >>network='eth0'> and have it Just Work.
> >>
> >>Another model would be to have libvirt see an SR-IOV adapter as a 
> >>network pool whereas it handled all of the VF management.  Considering 
> >>how inflexible SR-IOV is today, I'm not sure whether this is the best 
> >>model.
> >>    
> >
> >Agreed, given the hardware limitations I don't see that it is worth the
> >bother. 
> >
> >This new mode is not really what we'd call 'bridging' in libvirt network
> >XML format, so I think we'll want to define a new type of network config
> >for it in libvirt. Perhaps 
> >
> >  <network type='physical'>
> >    <source dev='eth0'/>
> >  </network>

Opps, when i write <network> here I actually mean <interface>

> >
> >Or type='passthru'
> >  
> 
> That certainly simplifies the problem.
> 
> I don't know whether SR-IOV requires additional setup though wrt 
> programming the VF's mac address.  It may make sense for libvirt to at 
> least do that.

Oh sure, that's easy enough - if there's no MAC in the XML we autogenerate
one anyway, so we always have a mac for every interface & do whatever is
needed with that.

Daniel
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