Re: [Qemu-devel] snabbswitch integration with QEMU for userspace ethernet I/O

[Luke Gorrie]

Hi Anthony,

On 27 May 2013 18:18, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:

It would be very interesting to combine this with vmsplice/splice.

Good point. This kernel-centric approach is a very promising one, though not the design we are exploring in the Snabb Switch project.

Snabb Switch is instead very hardware-centric. That is: we see the world as CPU cores, DRAM banks, PCIe devices. We want to keep our inter-process communication as close to this model as possible, which is why Virtio is very appealing - it looks like a DMA-based interface between two pieces of hardware. In this sense the kernel is like a BIOS: something that got you up and running, and takes care of lots of ugly irrelevant details for you, but that you don't want to have the minimum possible interaction with.

Some motivation explained in an old blog entry when deciding to take this route: http://blog.lukego.com/blog/2012/10/28/firmware-vs-software/