Re: [GIT PULL] AlacrityVM guest drivers for 2.6.33

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Wed Dec 23 2009 - 05:23:49 EST


On 12/23/2009 12:13 PM, Andi Kleen wrote:
i.e. it has all the makings of a stupid, avoidable, permanent fork. The thing
Nearly. There was no equivalent of a kernel based virtual driver host
before.

These are guest drivers. We have virtio drivers, and Xen drivers (which are Xen-specific).

- Are a pure software concept and any compatibility mismatch is
self-inflicted. The patches are in fact breaking the ABI to KVM
In practice, especially considering older kernel releases, VMs
behave like hardware, with all its quirks, compatibility requirements,
sometimes not fully understood, etc.

There was no attempt by Gregory to improve virtio-net.

It's a bit as if someone found a performance problem with sys_open() and came
up with sys_open_v2() and claimed that he wants to work with the VFS
developers while not really doing so but advances sys_open_v2() all the time.
AFAIK Gregory tried for several months to work with the KVM maintainers,
but failed at their NIH filter.

It was the backwards compatibility, live migration, unneeded complexity, and scalability filters from where I sit. vbus fails on all four.

The main difference is that Gregory claims that improved performance is not
possible within the existing KVM framework, while the KVM developers disagree.
The good news is that this is a hard, testable fact.
Yes clearly the onus at this point is on the vhost-net developers/
"pci is all that is ever needed for PV" proponents to show similar numbers
with their current code.

If they can show the same performance there's really no need for
the alacrityvm model (or at least I haven't seen a convincing reason
other than performance so far to have a separate model)

Anthony posted this:

http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/summit/cwright_11_open_source_virt.pdf

See slide 32. This is without vhost-net.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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