The protocol feature, VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_VHOST_PCI, indicates the support of vhost-pci. With the vhost-pci extension, the slave may actively sending meesages to the master. VHOST_USER_SET_FEATURES is one of the examples.
To understand this example, let's first understand how the device feature bits are negotiated between the slave device/driver and the master device/driver: 1) the master device (e.g. virtio-net) GET_FEATURES from the slave (assume the feature bits are "f1"); 2) the master device negotiates the feature bits with its driver (assume the device gets "f2" after the negotiation); 3) the master device SET_FEATURES("f2") to the slave; 4) the slave creates a slave device (e.g. vhost-pci-net) with "f2" and the slave device negotiates "f2" with its driver (assume the device gets "f3" after the negotiation); 5) the slave _actively_ SET_FEATURES("f3") to the master device; 6) if "f3" != "f2", the master device needs to perform a device reset and re-negotiate the feature bits with its driver using "f3". Signed-off-by: Wei Wang <wei.w.w...@intel.com> --- docs/specs/vhost-user.txt | 19 ++++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/specs/vhost-user.txt b/docs/specs/vhost-user.txt index d70bd83..3bbe641 100644 --- a/docs/specs/vhost-user.txt +++ b/docs/specs/vhost-user.txt @@ -17,12 +17,15 @@ The protocol defines 2 sides of the communication, master and slave. Master is the application that shares its virtqueues, in our case QEMU. Slave is the consumer of the virtqueues. -In the current implementation QEMU is the Master, and the Slave is intended to +In the traditional implementation QEMU is the master, and the slave is intended to be a software Ethernet switch running in user space, such as Snabbswitch. Master and slave can be either a client (i.e. connecting) or server (listening) in the socket communication. +The current vhost-user protocol is extended to support the vhost-pci based inter-VM +communication. In this case, both the slave and master are QEMU instances. + Message Specification --------------------- @@ -36,7 +39,7 @@ consists of 3 header fields and a payload: * Request: 32-bit type of the request * Flags: 32-bit bit field: - Lower 2 bits are the version (currently 0x01) - - Bit 2 is the reply flag - needs to be sent on each reply from the slave + - Bit 2 is the reply flag - needs to be sent on each reply - Bit 3 is the need_reply flag - see VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_REPLY_ACK for details. * Size - 32-bit size of the payload @@ -119,9 +122,9 @@ The protocol for vhost-user is based on the existing implementation of vhost for the Linux Kernel. Most messages that can be sent via the Unix domain socket implementing vhost-user have an equivalent ioctl to the kernel implementation. -The communication consists of master sending message requests and slave sending -message replies. Most of the requests don't require replies. Here is a list of -the ones that do: +Traditionally, the communication consists of master sending message requests and +slave sending message replies. Most of the requests don't require replies. Here +is a list of the ones that do: * VHOST_USER_GET_FEATURES * VHOST_USER_GET_PROTOCOL_FEATURES @@ -130,6 +133,10 @@ the ones that do: [ Also see the section on REPLY_ACK protocol extension. ] +Currently, the communication also supports the slave actively sending messages +to the master. Here is a list of them: + * VHOST_USER_SET_FEATURES + There are several messages that the master sends with file descriptors passed in the ancillary data: @@ -259,6 +266,7 @@ Protocol features #define VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_LOG_SHMFD 1 #define VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_RARP 2 #define VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_REPLY_ACK 3 +#define VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_VHOST_PCI 4 Message types ------------- @@ -279,6 +287,7 @@ Message types Id: 2 Ioctl: VHOST_SET_FEATURES Master payload: u64 + Slave payload: u64 Enable features in the underlying vhost implementation using a bitmask. Feature bit VHOST_USER_F_PROTOCOL_FEATURES signals slave support for -- 2.7.4