This PMD is a thin wrapper of the DPDK vhost library. The user can handle virtqueues as one of normal DPDK port.
Please refer to Chapter “Vhost Library” of DPDK Programmer’s Guide to know detail of vhost.
Currently, the vhost PMD provides the basic functionality of packet reception, transmission and event handling.
The user can specify below arguments in –vdev option.
iface:
It is used to specify a path to connect to a QEMU virtio-net device.
queues:
It is used to specify the number of queues virtio-net device has. (Default: 1)
iommu-support:
It is used to enable iommu support in vhost library. (Default: 0 (disabled))
postcopy-support:
It is used to enable postcopy live-migration support in vhost library. (Default: 0 (disabled))
tso:
It is used to enable tso support in vhost library. (Default: 0 (disabled))
This section describes how to handle vhost PMD events.
The user can register an event callback handler with rte_eth_dev_callback_register(). The registered callback handler will be invoked with one of below event types.
RTE_ETH_EVENT_INTR_LSC:
It means link status of the port was changed.
RTE_ETH_EVENT_QUEUE_STATE:
It means some of queue statuses were changed. Call rte_eth_vhost_get_queue_event() in the callback handler. Because changing multiple statuses may occur only one event, call the function repeatedly as long as it doesn’t return negative value.
This section demonstrates vhost PMD with testpmd DPDK sample application.
Launch the testpmd with vhost PMD:
./testpmd -l 0-3 -n 4 --vdev 'net_vhost0,iface=/tmp/sock0,queues=1' -- -i
Other basic DPDK preparations like hugepage enabling here. Please refer to the DPDK Getting Started Guide for detailed instructions.
Launch the QEMU:
qemu-system-x86_64 <snip>
-chardev socket,id=chr0,path=/tmp/sock0 \
-netdev vhost-user,id=net0,chardev=chr0,vhostforce,queues=1 \
-device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0
This command attaches one virtio-net device to QEMU guest. After initialization processes between QEMU and DPDK vhost library are done, status of the port will be linked up.