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

[Anthony Liguori]

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>
>
> 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.

-- 
Regards,

Anthony Liguori