18. Poll Mode Driver for Emulated Virtio NIC

18.1. Virtio Implementation in DPDK

For details about the virtio spec, refer to Virtio PCI Card Specification written by Rusty Russell.

As a PMD, virtio provides packet reception and transmission callbacks virtio_recv_pkts and virtio_xmit_pkts.

In virtio_recv_pkts, index in range [vq->vq_used_cons_idx , vq->vq_ring.used->idx) in vring is available for virtio to burst out.

In virtio_xmit_pkts, same index range in vring is available for virtio to clean. Virtio will enqueue to be transmitted packets into vring, advance the vq->vq_ring.avail->idx, and then notify the host back end if necessary.

18.2. Features and Limitations of virtio PMD

In this release, the virtio PMD driver provides the basic functionality of packet reception and transmission.

• It supports merge-able buffers per packet when receiving packets and scattered buffer per packet when transmitting packets. The packet size supported is from 64 to 1518.
• It supports multicast packets and promiscuous mode.
• The descriptor number for the Rx/Tx queue is hard-coded to be 256 by qemu. If given a different descriptor number by the upper application, the virtio PMD generates a warning and fall back to the hard-coded value.
• Features of mac/vlan filter are supported, negotiation with vhost/backend are needed to support them. When backend can’t support vlan filter, virtio app on guest should disable vlan filter to make sure the virtio port is configured correctly. E.g. specify ‘–disable-hw-vlan’ in testpmd command line.
• RTE_PKTMBUF_HEADROOM should be defined larger than sizeof(struct virtio_net_hdr), which is 10 bytes.
• Virtio does not support runtime configuration.
• Virtio supports Link State interrupt.
• Virtio supports software vlan stripping and inserting.
• Virtio supports using port IO to get PCI resource when uio/igb_uio module is not available.

18.3. Prerequisites

The following prerequisites apply:

• In the BIOS, turn VT-x and VT-d on
• Linux kernel with KVM module; vhost module loaded and ioeventfd supported. Qemu standard backend without vhost support isn’t tested, and probably isn’t supported.

18.4. Virtio with kni vhost Back End

This section demonstrates kni vhost back end example setup for Phy-VM Communication.

Fig. 18.1 Host2VM Communication Example Using kni vhost Back End

Host2VM communication example

1. Load the kni kernel module:

   insmod rte_kni.ko
   

   Other basic DPDK preparations like hugepage enabling, uio port binding are not listed here. Please refer to the DPDK Getting Started Guide for detailed instructions.

2. Launch the kni user application:

   examples/kni/build/app/kni -c 0xf -n 4 -- -p 0x1 -P --config="(0,1,3)"
   

   This command generates one network device vEth0 for physical port. If specify more physical ports, the generated network device will be vEth1, vEth2, and so on.

   For each physical port, kni creates two user threads. One thread loops to fetch packets from the physical NIC port into the kni receive queue. The other user thread loops to send packets in the kni transmit queue.

   For each physical port, kni also creates a kernel thread that retrieves packets from the kni receive queue, place them onto kni’s raw socket’s queue and wake up the vhost kernel thread to exchange packets with the virtio virt queue.

   For more details about kni, please refer to Kernel NIC Interface.

3. Enable the kni raw socket functionality for the specified physical NIC port, get the generated file descriptor and set it in the qemu command line parameter. Always remember to set ioeventfd_on and vhost_on.

   Example:

   echo 1 > /sys/class/net/vEth0/sock_en
   fd=`cat /sys/class/net/vEth0/sock_fd`
   exec qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host \
   -m 2048 -smp 4 -name dpdk-test1-vm1 \
   -drive file=/data/DPDKVMS/dpdk-vm.img \
   -netdev tap, fd=$fd,id=mynet_kni, script=no,vhost=on \
   -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=mynet_kni,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3,ioeventfd=on \
   -vnc:1 -daemonize
   

   In the above example, virtio port 0 in the guest VM will be associated with vEth0, which in turns corresponds to a physical port, which means received packets come from vEth0, and transmitted packets is sent to vEth0.

4. In the guest, bind the virtio device to the uio_pci_generic kernel module and start the forwarding application. When the virtio port in guest bursts Rx, it is getting packets from the raw socket’s receive queue. When the virtio port bursts Tx, it is sending packet to the tx_q.

   modprobe uio
   echo 512 > /sys/devices/system/node/node0/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages
   modprobe uio_pci_generic
   python tools/dpdk-devbind.py -b uio_pci_generic 00:03.0
   

   We use testpmd as the forwarding application in this example.

   

   Fig. 18.2 Running testpmd

5. Use IXIA packet generator to inject a packet stream into the KNI physical port.

   The packet reception and transmission flow path is:

   IXIA packet generator->82599 PF->KNI Rx queue->KNI raw socket queue->Guest VM virtio port 0 Rx burst->Guest VM virtio port 0 Tx burst-> KNI Tx queue ->82599 PF-> IXIA packet generator

18.5. Virtio with qemu virtio Back End

Fig. 18.3 Host2VM Communication Example Using qemu vhost Back End

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 2048 -smp 2 -mem-path /dev/
hugepages -mem-prealloc
-drive file=/data/DPDKVMS/dpdk-vm1
-netdev tap,id=vm1_p1,ifname=tap0,script=no,vhost=on
-device virtio-net-pci,netdev=vm1_p1,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3,ioeventfd=on
-device pci-assign,host=04:10.1 \

In this example, the packet reception flow path is:

IXIA packet generator->82599 PF->Linux Bridge->TAP0’s socket queue-> Guest VM virtio port 0 Rx burst-> Guest VM 82599 VF port1 Tx burst-> IXIA packet generator

The packet transmission flow is:

IXIA packet generator-> Guest VM 82599 VF port1 Rx burst-> Guest VM virtio port 0 Tx burst-> tap -> Linux Bridge->82599 PF-> IXIA packet generator

18.6. Virtio PMD Rx/Tx Callbacks

Virtio driver has 3 Rx callbacks and 2 Tx callbacks.

Rx callbacks:

1. virtio_recv_pkts: Regular version without mergeable Rx buffer support.
2. virtio_recv_mergeable_pkts: Regular version with mergeable Rx buffer support.
3. virtio_recv_pkts_vec: Vector version without mergeable Rx buffer support, also fixes the available ring indexes and uses vector instructions to optimize performance.

Tx callbacks:

1. virtio_xmit_pkts: Regular version.
2. virtio_xmit_pkts_simple: Vector version fixes the available ring indexes to optimize performance.

By default, the non-vector callbacks are used:

• For Rx: If mergeable Rx buffers is disabled then virtio_recv_pkts is used; otherwise virtio_recv_mergeable_pkts.
• For Tx: virtio_xmit_pkts.

Vector callbacks will be used when:

• txq_flags is set to VIRTIO_SIMPLE_FLAGS (0xF01), which implies:
  • Single segment is specified.
  • No offload support is needed.
• Mergeable Rx buffers is disabled.

The corresponding callbacks are:

• For Rx: virtio_recv_pkts_vec.
• For Tx: virtio_xmit_pkts_simple.

Example of using the vector version of the virtio poll mode driver in testpmd:

testpmd -c 0x7 -n 4 -- -i --txqflags=0xF01 --rxq=1 --txq=1 --nb-cores=1