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Subject: Re: [virtio-dev] Memory sharing device


BTW, I have a few concerns about the upcoming shared-mem virtio type. This is mostly directed at David and kraxel.

We've found that for many applications, simply telling the guest to create a new host pointer of Vulkan or OpenGL has quite some overhead in just telling the hypervisor to map it, and in fact, it's easy to run out of KVM slots by doing so. So for Vulkan, we rely on having one large host visible region on the host that is a single region of host shared memory. That, is then sub-allocated for the guest. So there is no Vulkan host pointer that is being shared to the guest 1:1; we suballocate, then generate the right 'underlying' Vulkan device memory offset and size parameters for the host.

In general though, this means that the ideal usage of host pointers would be to set a few regions up front for certain purposes, then share that out amongst other device contexts. This also facilitates sharing the memory between guest processes, which is useful for implementing things like compositors. This also features heavily for our "virtio userspace" thing. Since this is a common pattern, should this sharing concept be standardized somehow? I.e., should there be a standard way to send Shmid/offset/size to other devices, or have that be a standard struct in the hypervisor?

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 7:14 AM Frank Yang <lfy@google.com> wrote:


On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 6:49 AM Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 11:42:25PM -0800, Roman Kiryanov wrote:
> Hi Gerd,
>
> > virtio-gpu specifically needs that to support vulkan and opengl
> > extensions for coherent buffers, which must be allocated by the host gpu
> > driver. It's WIP still.
>
> the proposed spec says:
>
> +Shared memory regions MUST NOT be used to control the operation
> +of the device, nor to stream data; those should still be performed
> +using virtqueues.
>
> Is there a strong reason to prohibit using memory regions for control purposes?

That's in order to make virtio have portability implications, such that if
people see a virtio device in lspci they know there's
no lock-in, their guest can be moved between hypervisors
and will still work.

> Our long term goal is to have as few kernel drivers as possible and to move
> "drivers" into userspace. If we go with the virtqueues, is there
> general a purpose
> device/driver to talk between our host and guest to support custom hardware
> (with own blobs)?

The challenge is to answer the following question:
how to do this without losing the benefits of standartization?

Draft spec is incoming, but the basic idea is to standardize how to enumerate, discover, and operate (with high performance) such userspace drivers/devices; the basic operations would be standardized, and userspace drivers would be constructed out of the resulting primitives.

> Could you please advise if we can use something else to
> achieve this goal?

I am not sure what the goal is though. Blobs is a means I guess
or it should be :) E.g. is it about being able to iterate quickly?

Maybe you should look at vhost-user-gpu patches on qemu?
Would this address your need?
Acks for these patches would be a good thing.


Is this it:


I'll check it out and try to discuss. Is there a draft spec for it as well?
Â

--
MST


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