[libvirt] Supporting vhost-net and macvtap in libvirt for QEMU

Disclaimer: I am neither an SR-IOV nor a vhost-net expert, but I've CC'd people that are who can throw tomatoes at me for getting bits wrong :-) I wanted to start a discussion about supporting vhost-net in libvirt. vhost-net has not yet been merged into qemu but I expect it will be soon so it's a good time to start this discussion. There are two modes worth supporting for vhost-net in libvirt. The first mode is where vhost-net backs to a tun/tap device. This is behaves in very much the same way that -net tap behaves in qemu today. Basically, the difference is that the virtio backend is in the kernel instead of in qemu so there should be some performance improvement. Current, libvirt invokes qemu with -net tap,fd=X where X is an already open fd to a tun/tap device. I suspect that after we merge vhost-net, libvirt could support vhost-net in this mode by just doing -net vhost,fd=X. I think the only real question for libvirt is whether to provide a user visible switch to use vhost or to just always use vhost when it's available and it makes sense. Personally, I think the later makes sense. The more interesting invocation of vhost-net though is one where the vhost-net device backs directly to a physical network card. In this mode, vhost should get considerably better performance than the current implementation. I don't know the syntax yet, but I think it's reasonable to assume that it will look something like -net tap,dev=eth0. The effect will be that eth0 is dedicated to the guest. On most modern systems, there is a small number of network devices so this model is not all that useful except when dealing with SR-IOV adapters. In that case, each physical device can be exposed as many virtual devices (VFs). There are a few restrictions here though. The biggest is that currently, you can only change the number of VFs by reloading a kernel module so it's really a parameter that must be set at startup time. I think there are a few ways libvirt could support vhost-net in this second mode. The simplest would be to introduce a new tag similar to <source network='br0'>. In fact, if you probed the device type for the network parameter, you could probably do something like <source network='eth0'> and have it Just Work. Another model would be to have libvirt see an SR-IOV adapter as a network pool whereas it handled all of the VF management. Considering how inflexible SR-IOV is today, I'm not sure whether this is the best model. Has anyone put any more thought into this problem or how this should be modeled in libvirt? Michael, could you share your current thinking for -net syntax? -- Regards, Anthony Liguori