[Devel] Re: Network virtualization/isolation

Eric W. Biederman ebiederm at xmission.com
Sat Nov 25 15:16:06 PST 2006


"Leonid Grossman" <Leonid.Grossman at neterion.com> writes:

> I did not mean kernel bypass, just L2 hw channels that for 
> all practical purposes act as separate NICs - 
> different MAC addresses, no blocking, independent reset, etc.

Yes. Nearly all of what you need for safe kernel bypass.

>> In the worst case I might need someone to go as far as the 
>> Grand Unified Lookup to remove all of the overheads.  Except 
>> for distributing the work load more evenly across the machine 
>> with separate interrupts and the like I see no need for 
>> separate hardware channels to make things go fast for my needs.
>> 
>> Despite the title of this thread there is no virtualization 
>> or emulation of the hardware involved.  Just enhancements to 
>> the existing hardware abstractions.
>
> Right, I was just trying to say that IOV support (likely, from multiple
> vendors since
> virtualization is expected to be widely used) would provide an option to
> export multiple
> independent L2 interfaces from a single NIC - even if only a subset of 
> IOV functionality would be used in this case.

Agreed, and I think I understood that.  My basic point was that it
doesn't look to me like I need the hardware support, just that I can
use it when it is there.

The core advantage I see of the multiple queues, is in being able to
split the processing of network traffic and interrupts among multiple
cores.

Eric
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