Free Software programmer
rusty@rustcorp.com.au
Subscribe
Subscribe to a syndicated
feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of
RSS.
This blog existed before my current employment, and obviously reflects my own opinions and not theirs.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.1 Australia License.
Categories of this blog:
IP issues
Technical issues
Personal issues
Restaurants
Older issues:
All 2008 posts
All 2007 posts
All 2006 posts
All 2005 posts
All 2004 posts
Older posts
Wed, 09 Jan 2008
Partial checksumming of virtio net packets
Today I started hacking on adding extensions to the tun/tap driver; I was going to try adding async I/O but that seems to be a major reenginering and not likely to get in while syslets are waiting in the wings (so meanwhile just use a thread).
Partial checksumming and GSO support are my aims: virtio_net supports both at the moment but both kvm and lguest don't turn on those feature bits becasue tap doesn't support them.
This afternoon partial checksumming. Implemented, added some printks to make sure it was happening, and then started doing sendfile benchmarks (160MB guest to host). And the differences were marginal. David Miller pointed this out long ago: if you're copying the data with the CPU (as tap does), the checksumming calculation is in the noise.
So tomorrow is GSO support, and using get_user_pages() to avoid copying the skb (except some amount of header). Then it should be a real win...
The beautiful thing: I've made the GSO-describing header for the tap device suspiciously identical to the header for the virtio_net device, so the lguest launcher just passes the whole thing through.
[/tech] permanent link
