linux-kernel - Re: [PATCHv2] virtio: put last seen used index into ring itself

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Date:	Tue, 18 May 2010 13:26:36 +0200
From:	Juan Quintela <quintela@...hat.com>
To:	"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
Cc:	Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>,
	Jiri Pirko <jpirko@...hat.com>, Shirley Ma <xma@...ibm.com>,
	Amit Shah <amit.shah@...hat.com>,
	Mark McLoughlin <markmc@...hat.com>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, alex.williamson@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCHv2] virtio: put last seen used index into ring itself

"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com> wrote:
> Generally, the Host end of the virtio ring doesn't need to see where
> Guest is up to in consuming the ring.  However, to completely understand
> what's going on from the outside, this information must be exposed.
> For example, host can reduce the number of interrupts by detecting
> that the guest is currently handling previous buffers.
>
> Fortunately, we have room to expand: the ring is always a whole number
> of pages and there's hundreds of bytes of padding after the avail ring
> and the used ring, whatever the number of descriptors (which must be a
> power of 2).
>
> We add a feature bit so the guest can tell the host that it's writing
> out the current value there, if it wants to use that.
>
> This is based on a patch by Rusty Russell, with the main difference
> being that we dedicate a feature bit to guest to tell the host it is
> writing the used index.  This way we don't need to force host to publish
> the last available index until we have a use for it.
>
> Another difference is that while the feature helps virtio-net,
> there have been conflicting reports wrt virtio-blk.
> The reason is unknown, it could be due to the fact that
> virtio-blk does not bother to disable interrupts at all.
> So for now, this patch only acks this feature for -net.
>
> Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>
> Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@...hat.com>

It looks good.

Later, Juan.
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