Sergio Lopez sent a QEMU patch series and vhost-user protocol specification update that maps vhost-user to non-Linux POSIX host operating systems. This is great news because vhost-user has become a popular way to develop emulated devices in any programming language that execute as separate processes with their own security sandboxing. Until now they have only been available on Linux hosts.
At the moment the BSD and macOS implementation is slower than the Linux implementation because the KVM ioeventfd and irqfd primitives are unavailable on those operating systems. Instead POSIX pipes is used and the VMM (QEMU) needs to acts as a forwarder for MMIO/PIO accesses and interrupt injections. On Linux the kvm.ko kernel module has direct support for this, bypassing the VMM process and achieving higher efficiency. However, similar mechanisms could be added to non-KVM virtualization drivers in the future.
This means that vhost-user devices can now start to support multiple host operating systems and I'm sure they will be used in new ways that no one thought about before.
