netmap (+VALE) + QEMU

[mipsH]

According to this article:

https://www.linux-kvm.org/images/c/c5/Kvm-forum-2013-High-Performance-IO-for-VMs.pdf

Using netmap with VALE switch ( http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/ ) will get a much higher throughput even 5x than virtio (from presentation, for 64 byte packets up to 2.5Mpps in contrary to virtio : 0.5 Mpps).


netmap explained:
http://changeofelia.info.ucl.ac.be/pmwiki/uploads/SummerSchool/Program/poster_006.pdf

QEMU config looks like:
qemu -device e1000,netdev=n,mac= . . . -netdev netmap,id=n,ifname=valeA:x . . .

(Frankly i do not investigate more, maybe this project is in merge with some other or not )

Maybe to consider it in the near future Proxmox VE releases or just further investigate.


BR,
Hrvoje.

 

[mipsH]

Update:
VALE/DPDK/OVS performance tests : http://cnp.neclab.eu/vale

According to this article:
http://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/intro/install/dpdk/
OpenvSwitch can be build using DPDK library's for fast packet processing, so this can be another approach.

One more interesting presentation regarding OVS, QEMU, DPDK and netmap:
http://openvswitch.org/support/ovscon2014/18/1630-ovs-rizzo-talk.pdf

... and the netmap passthrough (as described in text below, use less CPU than DPDK ):
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/papers/20150315-netmap-passthrough.pdf