The recent development of a Linux driver framework called VIRTIO Data Path Acceleration (vDPA) has laid the groundwork for exciting new vhost-user features. The implications of vDPA have not yet rippled through the community so I want to share my thoughts on how the vhost-user protocol can take advantage of new ideas from vDPA.
This post is aimed at developers and assumes familiarity with the vhost-user protocol and VIRTIO. No knowledge of vDPA is required.
vDPA helps with writing drivers for hardware that supports VIRTIO offload. Its goal is to enable hybrid hardware/software VIRTIO devices, but as a nice side-effect it has overcome limitations in the kernel vhost interface. It turns out that applying ideas from vDPA to the vhost-user protocol solves the same issues there. In this article I'll show how extending the vhost-user protocol with vDPA has the following benefits:
- Allows existing VIRTIO device emulation code to act as a vhost-user device backend.
- Removes the need for shim devices in the virtual machine monitor (VMM).
- Replaces undocumented conventions with a well-defined device model.
These things can be done while reusing existing vhost-user and VIRTIO code. In fact, this is especially good news for existing codebases like QEMU because they already have a wealth of vhost-user and VIRTIO code that can now finally be connected together!
Let's look at the advantages of extending vhost-user with vDPA first and then discuss how to do it.
Why extend vhost-user with vDPA?
Reusing VIRTIO emulation code for vhost-user backends
It is a common misconception that a vhost device is a VIRTIO device. VIRTIO devices are defined in the VIRTIO specification and consist of a configuration space, virtqueues, and a device lifecycle that includes feature negotiation. A vhost device is a subset of the corresponding VIRTIO device. The exact subset depends on the device type, and some vhost devices are closer to the full functionality of their corresponding VIRTIO device than others. The most well-known example is that vhost-net devices have rx/tx virtqueues and but lack the virtio-net control virtqueue. Also, the configuration space and device lifecycle are only partially available to vhost devices.
This difference makes it impossible to use a VIRTIO device as a vhost-user device and vice versa. There is an impedance mismatch and missing functionality. That's a shame because existing VIRTIO device emulation code is mature and duplicating it to provide vhost-user backends creates additional work.
If there was a way to reuse existing VIRTIO device emulation code it would be easier to move to a multi-process architecture in QEMU. Want to run --netdev user,id=netdev0 --device virtio-net-pci,netdev=netdev0 in a separate, sandboxed process? Easy, run it as a vhost-user-net device instead of as virtio-net.
Making VMM device shims optional
Today each new vhost device type requires a shim device in the VMM. QEMU has --device vhost-user-blk-pci, --device vhost-user-input-pci, and so on. Why can't there be a single --device vhost-user device?
This limitation is a consequence of the fact that vhost devices are not full VIRTIO devices. In fact, a vhost device does not even have a way to report its device type (net, blk, scsi, etc). Therefore it is impossible for today's VMMs to offer a generic device. Each vhost device type requires a shim device.
In some cases a shim device is desirable because it allows the VMM to handle some aspects of the device instead of passing everything through to the vhost device backend. But requiring shims by default involves lots of tedious boilerplate code and prevents new device types from being used by older VMMs.
Providing a well-defined device model in vhost-user
Although vhost-user works well for users, it is difficult for developers to learn and extend. The protocol does not have a well-defined device model. Each device type has its own undocumented set of protocol messages that are used. For example, the vhost-user-blk device uses the configuration space whereas most other device types do not use the configuration space at all.
Since protocol use is not fully documented in the specification, developers might resort to reading Linux, QEMU, and DPDK code in order to figure out how to make their devices work. They typically have to debug vhost-user protocol messages and adjust their code until it appears to work. Hopefully the critical bugs are caught before the code ships. This is problematic because it's hard to produce high-quality vhost-user implementations.
Although the protocol specification can certainly be cleaned up, the problem is more fundamental. vhost-user badly needs a well-defined device model so that protocol usage is clear and uniform for all device types. The best way to do that is to simply adopt the VIRTIO device model. The VIRTIO specification already defines the device lifecycle and details of the device types. By making vhost-user devices full VIRTIO devices there is no need for additional vhost device specifications. The vhost-user specification just becomes a transport for the established VIRTIO device model. Luckily that is effectively what vDPA has done for kernel vhost ioctls.
How to do this in QEMU
The following QEMU changes are needed to implement vhost-user vDPA support. Below I will focus on vhost-user-net but most of the work is generic and benefits all device types.
Import vDPA ioctls into vhost-user
vDPA extends the Linux vhost ioctl interface. It uses a subset of vhost ioctls and adds new vDPA-specific ioctls that are implemented in the vhost_vdpa.ko kernel module. These new ioctls enable the full VIRTIO device model, including device IDs, the status register, configuration space, and so on.
In theory vhost-user could be fixed without vDPA, but it would involve effectively adding the same set of functionality that vDPA has already added onto kernel vhost. Reusing the vDPA ioctls allows VMMs to support both kernel vDPA and vhost-user with minimal code duplication.
This can be done by adding a VHOST_USER_PROTOCOL_F_VDPA feature bit to the vhost-user protocol. If both the vhost-user frontend and backend support vDPA then all vDPA messages are available. Otherwise they can either fall back on legacy vhost-user behavior or drop the connection.
The vhost-user specification could be split into a legacy section and a modern vDPA-enabled section. The modern protocol will remove vhost-user messages that are not needed by vDPA, simplifying the protocol for new developers while allowing existing implementations to support both with minimal changes.
One detail is that vDPA does not use the memory table mechanism for sharing memory. Instead it relies on the richer IOMMU message family that is optional in vhost-user today. This approach can be adopted in vhost-user too, making the IOMMU code path standard for all implementations and dropping the memory table mechanism.
Add vhost-user vDPA to the vhost code
QEMU's hw/virtio/vhost*.c code supports kernel vhost, vhost-user, and kernel vDPA. A vhost-user vDPA mode must be added to implement the new protocol. It can be implemented as a combination of the vhost-user and kernel vDPA code already in QEMU. Most likely the existing vhost-user code can simply be extended to enable vDPA support if the backend supports it.
Only small changes to hw/net/virtio-net.c and net/vhost-user.c are needed to use vhost-user vDPA with net devices. At that point QEMU can connect to a vhost-user-net device backend and use vDPA extensions.
Add a vhost-user vDPA VIRTIO transport
Next a vhost-user-net device backend can be put together using QEMU's virtio-net emulation. A translation layer is needed between the vhost-user protocol and the VirtIODevice type in QEMU. This can be done by implementing a new VIRTIO transport alongside the existing pci, mmio, and ccw transports. The transport processes vhost-user protocol messages from the UNIX domain socket and invokes VIRTIO device emulation code inside QEMU. It acts as a VIRTIO bus so that virtio-net-device, virtio-blk-device, and other device types can be plugged in.
This piece is the most involved but the vhost-user protocol communication part was already implemented in the virtio-vhost-user prototype that I worked on previously. Most of the communication code can be reused and the remainder is implementing the VirtioBusClass interface.
To summarize, a new transport acts as the vhost-user device backend and invokes QEMU VirtIODevice methods in response to vhost-user protocol messages. The syntax would be something like --device virtio-net-device,id=virtio-net0 --device vhost-user-backend,device=virtio-net0,addr.type=unix,addr.path=/tmp/vhost-user-net.sock.
Where this converges with multi-process QEMU
At this point QEMU can run ad-hoc vhost-user backends using existing VIRTIO device models. It is possible to go further by creating a qemu-dev launcher executable that implements the vhost-user spec's "Backend program conventions". This way a minimal device emulator executable hosts the device instead of a full system emulator.
The requirements for this are similar to the multi-process QEMU effort, which aims to run QEMU devices as separate processes. One of the main open questions is how to design build system and Kconfig support for building minimal device emulator executables.
In the case of vhost-user-net the qemu-dev-vhost-user-net executable would contain virtio-net-device, vhost-user-backend, any netdevs the user wishes to include, a QMP monitor, and a vhost-user backend command-line interface.
Where does this leave us? QEMU's existing VIRTIO device models can be used as vhost-user devices and run in a separate processes from the VMM. It's a great way of reusing code and having the flexibility to deploy it in the way that makes most sense for the intended use case.
Conclusion
The vhost-user protocol can be simplified by adopting the vhost vDPA ioctls that have recently been introduced in Linux. This turns vhost-user into a VIRTIO transport and vhost-user devices become full VIRTIO devices. Existing VIRTIO device emulation code can then be reused in vhost-user device backends.
