Would there be interest in virtualization of the ixgbe driver?

[Jack Vogel]

Doesn't matter, I have a coworker who handles Solaris, he can probably
give me some info :)  SRIOV allows you to partition the device at the PCI
level and then you can 'assign' to a virtual guest or whatever, its still
the
most desireable to me.

Jack


On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Brandon Gooch <jamesbrandongooch at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Ryan Stone <rysto32 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > At $WORK I've implemented an extension of the ixgbe driver that
> > provides multiple virtualized ixgbe interfaces.  The implementation
> > uses the 8259[89]'s virtualization features, so the rx and tx paths of
> > the virtual interfaces are completely independent.  From the
> > perspective of everything above the ixgbe driver, it's as if there are
> > multiple physical interfaces present.
> >
> > The use-case for the feature at $WORK is very specific to our
> > architecture, but I can imagine that having hardware-based virtual
> > interfaces could be useful with jails, vnet or when using FreeBSD as
> > the host OS for something like VirtualBox.  I'm really not very
> > familiar with what people do or want to do with virtualization on
> > FreeBSD, so I don't have any kind of idea as to whether this feature
> > could be useful to the community.
> >
> > Currently the code is not in a state that could be submitted to jfv@
> > for consideration: I disabled certain features like RSS because I
> > didn't need them in my implementation, and interfaces can only be
> > created at boot(via tunable).  Before I start working on cleaning it
> > up, I want to know if people think that such a feature would be
> > worthwhile or useful to them.
> >
> > The way that I envision this working is that you'd run something like
> > "ifconfig vix0 create parent ix1" to create a new virtual interface
> > sharing the same physical interface as ix1.  From that point on, vix0
> > would be a completely different interface from ix1, with its own MAC,
> > vlan table, IPs, etc.
>
> It would be nice to split up the hardware for use with vnet jails. The
> virtualization technique you are describing -- it sounds similar to
> how network device virtualization is done in the Solaris "Project
> Crossbow" implementation. Can you comment on this?
>
> In other words, would we have the ability to have a vnet jail tied to
> specific hardware resources (Rx/Tx rings with their own DMA channels
> and interrupts, etc...).
>
> I'm sorry, I don't have a link to the "Project Crossbow" features to
> which I'm referring.
>
> -Brandon
>