In cloud native environment, we need a lightweight and secure system. It
should benefit from the speed of containers and the security of VM, which
is classified as secure containers. The traditional solution of cloud VM
is Qemu. In fact we don't need to pay for the legacy devices. Currently,
more userspace VMMs, e.g. Qemu, Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor and Alibaba
Cloud VMM which is called Dragonball, began to pay attention to a
lightweight solution.
The lightweight VMM is suitable to cloud native infrastructure which is
designed for creating secure sandbox to address the requirements of
multi-tenant. Meanwhile, with faster startup time and lower memory
overhead, it makes possible to launch thousands of microVMs on the same
machine. This VMM minimizes the emulation devices and uses virtio-mmio to
get a more lightweight transport layer. The virtio-mmio devices have less
code than virtio-pci, which can decrease boot time and increase deploy
density by customizing kernel such as setting pci=off. From another point
of view, the minimal device can reduce the attack surface.
We have compared the number of files and the lines of code between
virtio-mmio and virio-pci.
Virtio-PCI Virtio-MMIO
number of files(Linux) 161 1
lines of code(Linux) 78237 538
number of files(Qemu) 24 1
lines of code(Qemu) 8952 421
But the current standard virtio-mmio spec has some limitations which is
only support legacy interrupt and will cause performance penalties.
To address such limitation, we proposed to update virtio-mmio spec with
two new feature bits to support MSI interrupt and enhancing notification
mechanism[1], which can achieve the same performance as virtio-pci devices
with only around 600 lines of code.
Here are the performance gain of MSI interrupt in virtio-mmio. Each case is
repeated three times.
netperf -t TCP_RR -H 192.168.1.36 -l 30 -- -r 32,1024
Virtio-PCI Virtio-MMIO Virtio-MMIO(MSI)
trans/s 9536 6939 9500
trans/s 9734 7029 9749
trans/s 9894 7095 9318
With the virtio spec proposal[1], other VMMs (e.g. Qemu) can also make use
of the new features to get a enhancing performance.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/1/21/31
Change Log:
v1->v2
* Change version update to feature bit
* Add mask/unmask support
* Add two MSI sharing/non-sharing modes
* Create generic irq domain for all architectures
Liu Jiang (5):
virtio-mmio: add notify feature for per-queue
virtio-mmio: refactor common functionality
virtio-mmio: create a generic MSI irq domain
virtio-mmio: add MSI interrupt feature support
x86: virtio-mmio: support virtio-mmio with MSI for x86
arch/x86/kernel/apic/msi.c | 11 +-
drivers/base/platform-msi.c | 4 +-
drivers/virtio/Kconfig | 9 +
drivers/virtio/virtio_mmio.c | 351 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
drivers/virtio/virtio_mmio_common.h | 39 ++++
drivers/virtio/virtio_mmio_msi.h | 175 ++++++++++++++++++
include/linux/msi.h | 1 +
include/uapi/linux/virtio_config.h | 13 +-
include/uapi/linux/virtio_mmio.h | 31 ++++
9 files changed, 596 insertions(+), 38 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 drivers/virtio/virtio_mmio_common.h
create mode 100644 drivers/virtio/virtio_mmio_msi.h
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1.8.3.1
