numam-spdk/doc/virtio.md
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Signed-off-by: Maciej Wawryk <maciejx.wawryk@intel.com>
Change-Id: Ib5f832c549880771c99c15b89affe1e82acd3fa4
Reviewed-on: https://review.spdk.io/gerrit/c/spdk/spdk/+/9045
Reviewed-by: Tomasz Zawadzki <tomasz.zawadzki@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jim Harris <james.r.harris@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Ben Walker <benjamin.walker@intel.com>
Community-CI: Broadcom CI <spdk-ci.pdl@broadcom.com>
Community-CI: Mellanox Build Bot
Tested-by: SPDK CI Jenkins <sys_sgci@intel.com>
2021-08-26 19:27:22 +00:00

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# Virtio driver {#virtio}
## Introduction {#virtio_intro}
SPDK Virtio driver is a C library that allows communicating with Virtio devices.
It allows any SPDK application to become an initiator for (SPDK) vhost targets.
The driver supports two different usage models:
* PCI - This is the standard mode of operation when used in a guest virtual
machine, where QEMU has presented the virtio controller as a virtual PCI device.
* vhost-user - Can be used to connect to a vhost socket directly on the same host.
The driver, just like the SPDK @ref vhost, is using pollers instead of standard
interrupts to check for an I/O response. If used inside a VM, it bypasses interrupt
and context switching overhead of QEMU and guest kernel, significantly boosting
the overall I/O performance.
This Virtio library is currently used to implement two bdev modules:
@ref bdev_config_virtio_scsi and @ref bdev_config_virtio_blk.
These modules will export generic SPDK block devices usable by any SPDK application.
## 2MB hugepages {#virtio_2mb}
vhost-user specification puts a limitation on the number of "memory regions" used (8).
Each region corresponds to one file descriptor, and DPDK - as SPDK's memory allocator -
uses one file per hugepage by default. So *by default* this makes SPDK Virtio practical
with only 1GB hugepages. To run an SPDK app using Virtio initiator with 2MB hugepages
it is required to pass '-g' command-line option . This forces DPDK to create a single
non-physically-contiguous hugetlbfs file for all its memory.