What it is: vhost net is a character device that can be used to reduce
the number of system calls involved in virtio networking.
Existing virtio net code is used in the guest without modification.
There's similarity with vringfd, with some differences and reduced scope
- uses eventfd for signalling
- structures can be moved around in memory at any time (good for
migration, bug work-arounds in userspace)
- write logging is supported (good for migration)
- support memory table and not just an offset (needed for kvm)
common virtio related code has been put in a separate file vhost.c and
can be made into a separate module if/when more backends appear. I used
Rusty's lguest.c as the source for developing this part : this supplied
me with witty comments I wouldn't be able to write myself.
What it is not: vhost net is not a bus, and not a generic new system
call. No assumptions are made on how guest performs hypercalls.
Userspace hypervisors are supported as well as kvm.
How it works: Basically, we connect virtio frontend (configured by
userspace) to a backend. The backend could be a network device, or a tap
device. Backend is also configured by userspace, including vlan/mac
etc.
Status: This works for me, and I haven't see any crashes.
Compared to userspace, people reported improved latency (as I save up to
4 system calls per packet), as well as better bandwidth and CPU
utilization.
Features that I plan to look at in the future:
- mergeable buffers
- zero copy
- scalability tuning: figure out the best threading model to use
Note on RCU usage (this is also documented in vhost.h, near
private_pointer which is the value protected by this variant of RCU):
what is happening is that the rcu_dereference() is being used in a
workqueue item. The role of rcu_read_lock() is taken on by the start of
execution of the workqueue item, of rcu_read_unlock() by the end of
execution of the workqueue item, and of synchronize_rcu() by
flush_workqueue()/flush_work(). In the future we might need to apply
some gcc attribute or sparse annotation to the function passed to
INIT_WORK(). Paul's ack below is for this RCU usage.
(Includes fixes by Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>,
David L Stevens <dlstevens@us.ibm.com>,
Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>)
Acked-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
This allows subsytems to provide devtmpfs with non-default permissions
for the device node. Instead of the default mode of 0600, null, zero,
random, urandom, full, tty, ptmx now have a mode of 0666, which allows
non-privileged processes to access standard device nodes in case no
other userspace process applies the expected permissions.
This also fixes a wrong assignment in pktcdvd and a checkpatch.pl complain.
Signed-off-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
This adds support for misc devices to report their requested nodename to
userspace. It also updates a number of misc drivers to provide the
needed subdirectory and device name to be used for them.
Signed-off-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Blunck <jblunck@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Move FUSE_MINOR to miscdevice.h. While at it, de-uglify the file.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
After 2.6.24 there was a plan to make the PM core acquire all device
semaphores during a suspend/hibernation to protect itself from
concurrent operations involving device objects. That proved to be
too heavy-handed and we found a better way to achieve the goal, but
before it happened, we had introduced the functions
device_pm_schedule_removal() and destroy_suspended_device() to allow
drivers to "safely" destroy a suspended device and we had adapted some
drivers to use them. Now that these functions are no longer necessary,
it seems reasonable to remove them and modify their users to use the
normal device unregistration instead.
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Acked-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Make it possible to unregister a misc device object in a safe way during a
suspend/resume cycle.
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: "John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>
Cc: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Cc: Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Cc: Richard Purdie <rpurdie@rpsys.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This also ment that some of the misc drivers had to also be fixed
up as they were assuming the device was a class_device.
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Mark the f_ops members of inodes as const, as well as fix the
ripple-through this causes by places that copy this f_ops and then "do
stuff" with it.
Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Michael S. Tsirkin