How is irq delivered in kvm?

2011-04-21 Thread Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy
Hi,

I have a specialized e1000 device driver that expects to receive a
single frame per interrupt, no more. It's by design and very hard to
change (and it does not serve IP traffic). -net socket or tap can
sometimes deliver more than one frame in a row and blow up the driver
in turn. I'd like to experiment with tap/socket to only call
qemu_send_packet..() once and leave pending frames in queue until next
time, with hope that guest will have time to process the frame.

The problem is I'm new to kvm and not sure how the main loop is run.
Will there be guest execution time between two tap/socket polls, how
long is it? Or is guest run in parallel with the event loop and
qemu_set_irq() somehow signals guest immediately?
-- 
Duy
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Re: How is irq delivered in kvm?

2011-04-21 Thread Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Avi Kivity a...@redhat.com wrote:
 On 04/21/2011 04:49 PM, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

 Hi,

 I have a specialized e1000 device driver that expects to receive a
 single frame per interrupt, no more. It's by design and very hard to
 change (and it does not serve IP traffic). -net socket or tap can
 sometimes deliver more than one frame in a row and blow up the driver
 in turn. I'd like to experiment with tap/socket to only call
 qemu_send_packet..() once and leave pending frames in queue until next
 time, with hope that guest will have time to process the frame.

 I don't understand how the driver can expect that.  The card is free to
 deliver multiple packets per interrupt.  Are you counting on fast timing to
 process the packet before the next packet arrives?

Yes. It uses ethernet as transport to clone memory from one machine
to another in a short, precalculated amount of time.

 If you restrict the number of buffers you provide to the card to exactly
 one, you'll get one packet per interrupts (and dropped packets).

 The problem is I'm new to kvm and not sure how the main loop is run.
 Will there be guest execution time between two tap/socket polls, how
 long is it? Or is guest run in parallel with the event loop and
 qemu_set_irq() somehow signals guest immediately?

 The latter, it's in parallel.

 Are you using qemu-kvm or qemu?  qemu-kvm will deliver better interrupt
 performance.

I'm using qemu-kvm. What function is used to deliver the interrupt
then, kvm_inject_irq?
-- 
Duy
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