Re: Inter-VM device emulation (call on Mon 20th July 2020)

[Alex Bennée]

Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you everyone who joined!
>
> I didn't take notes but two things stood out:
>
> 1. The ivshmem v2 and virtio-vhost-user use cases are quite different
> so combining them does not seem realistic. ivshmem v2 needs to be as
> simple for the hypervisor to implement as possible even if this
> involves some sacrifices (e.g. not transparent to the Driver VM that
> is accessing the device, performance). virtio-vhost-user is more aimed
> at general-purpose device emulation although support for arbitrary
> devices (e.g. PCI) would be important to serve all use cases.

I believe my phone gave up on the last few minutes of the call so I'll
just say we are interested in being able to implement arbitrary devices
in the inter-VM silos. Devices we are looking at:

  virtio-audio
  virtio-video

these are performance sensitive devices which provide a HAL abstraction
to a common software core.

  virtio-rpmb

this is a secure device where the backend may need to reside in a secure
virtualised world.

  virtio-scmi

this is a more complex device which allows the guest to make power and
clock demands from the firmware. Needless to say this starts to become
complex with multiple moving parts.

The flexibility of vhost-user seems to match up quite well with wanting
to have a reasonably portable backend that just needs to be fed signals
and a memory mapping. However we don't want daemons to automatically
have a full view of the whole of the guests system memory.

> 2. Alexander Graf's idea for a new Linux driver that provides an
> enforcing software IOMMU. This would be a character device driver that
> is mmapped by the device emulation process (either vhost-user-style on
> the host or another VMM for inter-VM device emulation). The Driver VMM
> can program mappings into the device and the page tables in the device
> emulation process will be updated. This way the Driver VMM can share
> memory specific regions of guest RAM with the device emulation process
> and revoke those mappings later.

I'm wondering if there is enough plumbing on the guest side so a guest
can use the virtio-iommu to mark out exactly which bits of memory the
virtual device can have access to? At a minimum the virtqueues need to
be accessible and for larger transfers maybe a bounce buffer. However
for speed you want as wide as possible mapping but no more. It would be
nice for example if a block device could load data directly into the
guests block cache (zero-copy) but without getting a view of the kernels
internal data structures.

Another thing that came across in the call was quite a lot of
assumptions about QEMU and Linux w.r.t virtio. While our project will
likely have Linux as a guest OS we are looking specifically at enabling
virtio for Type-1 hypervisors like Xen and the various safety certified
proprietary ones. It is unlikely that QEMU would be used as the VMM for
these deployments. We want to work out what sort of common facilities
hypervisors need to support to enable virtio so the daemons can be
re-usable and maybe setup with a minimal shim for the particular
hypervisor in question.


-- 
Alex Bennée