[Xen-users] DomU - network performance and possibilities (HVM, PVM, pci-passthru, stubdom, PV on HVM...)

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

Hello,

Matej: I didn't get your initial post to xen-users because I got 
(automatically) unsubscribed 
from the list, due to my email provider getting blacklisted because of some 
spam problems,
but now I subscribed again.. 

To answer your questions:

1) No, it's not possible to use VirtIO with Xen.
2) Yes, it's possible to use PV-on-HVM drivers in the guest with pvops dom0.

3) Take a look at: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenLinuxPVonHVMdrivers

Did you already make some benchmarks? If you need good latency then I think 
PCI passthrough will help a lot there.. or Xen netchannel2.

-- Pasi


Original email from Matej:

Hi,


I want to (need to) do a network performance analysis/benchmark of
various Xen networking solutions (analyzing the pros and cons of network
infrastructure virtualisation) on top of Xen 4.0. 

So far I have Xen 4.0 running with various Dom0 kernels (git stable
2.6.32.11, git stable 2.6.31.13, mercurial 2.6.18.8, Debian distribution
2.6.26-2xen...want try some newer forward ported Xen kernel too).

AFAIK, there are these possibilities for DomU "architecture".    

1. DomU as classic emulated HVM.
2. DomU as classic PVM (pv_ops kernel and Xen kernel)
3. DomU as classic emulated HVM with Xen PV drivers (don't know whether
these work with pv_ops Dom0, but for that case I have the 2.6.18.8 Xen
linux)
4. DomU as classic PVM with pass-thru PCI NICs
5. DomU as classic HVM with pass-thru PCI NICs (don't have IOMMU capable
HW :( )
6. DomU as HVM with stubdom (according to various papers, this should be
a bit faster than classic HVM DomU)
7. DomU as HVM with virtio drivers (is this possible in xen4.0?)



I'm interested in the latency and bandwidth performance in phys-DomU and
DomU-DomU scenarios (I have own tool for network latency benchmarking
and for bandwidth there's the Iperf :) ). Also I will try to experiment
a bit with the CPU pinning and schedulers in these scenarios.

Also would like to test and testbench OpenSwitch as linux-bridge
replacement (but I'm afraid I will not have time for this).

So my questions are:

1. Is possible to use VirtIO with XEN 4.0 (as another approach on the
PV-on-HVM)?
2. Is possible to use the Xen HVM DomU PV drivers (unmodified drivers?)
with pvops Dom0?
3. If you have some ideas or hints, I will be very thankful. :)


Regards

Matej


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