Overview

Virtio Host PMD provides a virtual NIC Poll Mode Driver for high performance communication between a host and Virtio guests. The host leverages 6WINDGate DPDK. Both standard Linux guests running the Linux Virtio driver and guests using 6WINDGate DPDK running Virtio Guest XEN-KVM PMD are supported.

Virtio Host PMD is usually combined with 6WINDGate Fast Path OVS Acceleration to enable high performance virtual switching between VMs and the outside world.

Features

• Packet Rx/Tx with configurable queue/ring to core mapping
• Jumbo frames
• Software counters and statistics
• Start, stop, and close operations
• Offload support: checksum, TSO
• Live migration
• Packet distribution using round-robin or flow hash computed from Ethernet protocol, vlan ID, IP addresses, L4 protocols and ports out of the most inner packet inside Ethernet, VLAN, IPv4, IPv6, IP tunnels, GRE.
• Dynamic multi-queue configuration, based on Qemu 2.5 API

Dependencies

6WINDGate modules

• 6WINDGate DPDK

QEMU

• QEMU >= 2.1

• To support multiple queues with QEMU < 2.5, apply the following patch against QEMU:

  https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/432404/

• To support migration with QEMU < 2.5, apply the following patch against QEMU:

  https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/488672/

• To support vhost-user PMDs on guests with more than 2 GB memory, QEMU versions lower than 2.2 may need the patch below. For more information, contact your Linux distribution provider.

  http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commitdiff;h=d3f16ec887bb58b19eac94fcae139a39a7933e15

libvirt

• libvirt >= 1.2.10

• To support live migration with libvirt <= 1.2.12, apply the following patch against libvirt:

  http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commitdiff;h=bd1a133fc8aa3ef847046094f01133708f455d20