Improving user networking performance

[Anders Pitman]

I'm trying to improve user networking performance, especially from a Windows 10 host, Linux guest. My goal is to get at least 100Mbps duplex. I'm hoping to be able to saturate a 1Gbps link. I need to avoid requiring any admin privileges, which is why I'm doing user networking instead of setting up a TAP device.

Currently I'm seeing about 20-50Mbps on an older Windows 10 laptop. Enabling -accel whpx improves that significantly, but still not 1Gbps, and requires Windows Pro and extra steps for the user to enable virtualization.

I have a few specific questions:

* Is 1Gbps realistic with my desired setup?

* Does virtio work with the slirp user networking? I can enable it, but I'm not sure it's making much difference.

* Is there potential to improve upon slirp with a different user networking implementation? It seems like if you set up an ivshmem interface (similar to how Looking Glass works) you could get really efficient packet transfers. I was under the impression this is how slirp+virtio would work, but again I'm not seeing the hoped-for performance.

If such a thing is possible but doesn't exist, I would be interested in working on it myself. I would appreciate any pointers on any additional resources to get started with this.

Thanks,

//anders