Re: [libvirt-users] How can a bridge be optimized?

On Sat, Jun 02, 2012 at 11:43:34PM -0400, Andrew Cathrow wrote: Looking into background info on these, it looks like SR-IOV capability is specific to certain NICs and not documented for KVM/libvirt in any obvious place. Maybe I just didn't find it. Openvswitch looks more widely useable and promising, but also lacking user-level documentation. Openvswitch.org's "Documentation" section has three brief notes, all presuming you've already got it in use. Okay, so falling back to macvtap, a long post from over a year ago at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1687750 says that the host cannot communicate directly with the guests through the bridge when using it. Is this correct? That would rule it out for my use. So now I fall back to the question of whether I should enable virtio where I've currently got (working, but slowish) bridges defined. (I've got virtio in use for memballoon, but not for the bridges.) I look at http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio and while helpful it underspecifies: In the <interface> section, add a virtio model, like this: <interface type='network'> ... <model type='virtio' /> </interface> That's all it says. So ... I've got entries that currently look about like: <interface type='bridge'> <mac address='52:54:00:25:0a:a2'/> <source bridge='br0'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/> </interface> What if anything should carry across to the elipsis in the doc? The doc at http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Tuning_KVM is similarly terse, and puts it in terms of the qemu command line, rather than libvirt XML, so not completely helpful short of studying how libvirt translates the XML to that line. Ah, here's a more useful doc at http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Guest_configuration_2: Guest configuration In order to let your virtual machines use this bridge, their configuration should include the interface definition as described in Bridge to LAN. In essence you are specifying the bridge name to connect to. Assuming a shared physical device where the bridge is called "br0", the following guest XML would be used: <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='br0'/> <mac address='00:16:3e:1a:b3:4a'/> <model type='virtio'/> # try this if you experience problems with VLANs </interface> So the <model type='virtio'/> can just go under <interface type='bridge'>, that doesn't need to change to <interface type='network'>. Then should the current line like: <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/> stay or go? Do others share my perception that it's a shame there's so little interest in writing good docs in this whole area? Regards, Whit