Hi,
Could you please tell me if there has been any more work on virtio-vhost-user or vhost-pci? The last messages that I could find were from January 2018, from this thread [1], and from what I see the latest Qemu code does not have that included.
I am currently running multiple VMs, connected in between by the DPDK vhost-switch. A VM can start, reboot, shutdown, so much of this is dynamic and the vhost-switch handles all of these. So these VMs are some sort of "endpoints" (I could not find a better naming).
The code which runs on the VM endpoints is somehow tied to the vhost-switch code, and if I change something on the VM which breaks the compatibility, I need to recompile the vhost-switch and restart. The problem is that most of the time I forget to update the vhost-switch, and I run into other problems.
If I could use a VM as a vhost-switch instead of the DPDK app, then I hope that in my endpoint code which runs on the VM, I can add functionality to make it also run as a switch, and forward the packets between the other VMs like the current DPDK switch does. Doing so would allow me to catch this out-of-sync between the VM endpoint code and the switch code at compile time, since they will be part of the same app.
This would be a two-phase process. First to run the DPDK vhost-switch inside a guest VM, and then to move the tx-rx part into my app.
Both Qemu and the DPDK app use "vhost-user". I was happy to see that I can start Qemu in vhost-user server mode:
<interface type='vhostuser'>
<mac address='52:54:00:9c:3a:e3'/>
<source type='unix' path='/home/cosmin/vsocket.server' mode='server'/>
<model type='virtio'/>
<driver queues='2'>
<host mrg_rxbuf='on'/>
</driver>
<address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/>
</interface>
This would translate to these Qemu arguments:
-chardev socket,id=charnet1,path=/home/cosmin/vsocket.server,server -netdev type=vhost-user,id=hostnet1,chardev=charnet1,queues=2 -device virtio-net-pci,mrg_rxbuf=on,mq=on,vectors=6,netdev=hostnet1,id=net1,mac=52:54:00:9c:3a:e3,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4
But at this point Qemu will not boot the VM until there is a vhost-user client connecting to Qemu. I even tried adding the "nowait" argument, but Qemu still waits. This will not work in my case, as the endpoint VMs could start and stop at any time, and I don't even know how many network interfaces the endpoint VMs will have.
I then found the virtio-vhost-user transport protocol [2], and was thinking that I could at least start the packet-switching VM, and then let the DPDK app inside it do the forwarding of the packets. But from what I understand, this creates a single network interface inside the VM on which the DPDK app can bind. The limitation here is that if another VM wants to connect to the packet-switching VM, I need to manually add another virtio-vhost-user-pci device (and a new vhost-user.sock) before this packet-switching VM starts, so this is not dynamic.
The second approach for me would be to use vhost-pci [3], which I could not fully understand how it works, but I think it presents a network interface to the guest kernel after another VM connects to the first one.
I realize I made a big story and probably don't make too much sense, but one more thing. The ideal solution for me would be a combination of the vhost-user socket and the vhost-pci socket. The Qemu will start the VM and the socket will wait in the background for vhost-user connections. When a new connection is established, Qemu should create a hot-plugable PCI network card and either the guest kernel or the DPDK app inside to handle the vhost-user messages.
Any feedback will be welcome, and I really appreciate all your work :)
Cosmin.