Re: Improving user networking performance

[Paul Menzel]

Dear Anders,


Am 05.04.22 um 22:31 schrieb 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.

Please share the command line, how you start the GNU/Linux VM, and what 
GNU/Linux distribution you use.

> Currently I'm seeing about 20-50Mbps on an older Windows 10 laptop.

Please be specific. What kind of laptop (CPU, …)?

How do you measure the transfer speed?

> 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.

I’d say it should be possible with not-too old hardware, but I never 
tried it myself.


Kind regards,

Paul