[vbox-dev] is virtstor being implemented?

[Liang Suilong]

Virtio is not more complicated than other device. Linux has native support
for virtio-blk. Users does not need to install additional drivers for disk
controller. In Windows guest, user should press F2 or F6 for loading
virtio-blk drivers in installation process just like loading RAID driver. I
do not think this is less user friendly.

Another not related topic for Huihong Luo, How about the tray icon of host
for application in guest, a button on the panel listing guest's programs.
Has this implement done?

2010/10/19 Achim Hasenmüller <achim.hasenmueller at oracle.com>

> What you describe is basically how SATA and SCSI/SAS work :-)
>
> Honestly, we don't see any reason to implement virtstor. We do not expect
> any performance advantages and whereas a network driver is easy to
> add/change after install, a disk controller is more complicated and less
> user friendly.
>
> I would say that there isn't much out there that can compete with VBox when
> it comes to disk performance. Our performance work is now mostly focused
> around network as this is clearly where we have room for improvement. We
> want to continue to improve the E1000 device but for ultimate performance,
> our efforts are currently focused on virtio. Once we can make full use of
> receive and send offloading, we should be good.
>
> Achim
>
>
> On Oct 19, 2010, at 8:14 , Huihong Luo wrote:
>
> yes, it's the speed reason. In theory, virtstor is supposed to be fast.
> However, since vbox is already doing so well on disk, I am not sure how much
> further can be improved.
>
> In theory, virtstor bypasses many calls, and goes directly to the cheese,
> i.e., block i/o data transfer. The performance depends how well the
> mechanism for the transfer between vm and host, which is why I mentioned
> share folders. (btw, I know the difference between file sysem and block
> driver, I do that for a living). What I mean is that we can use the same
> large data transfer mechanism if shared folder's performance is very good.
>
> for example, a user app wants to write 10k data to the disk, it goes to the
> virtio driver after  a few calls in windows, if the virtstor driver can
> efficiently (directly) transfer the buffer to the host, perhaps through
> memory sharing, or pinned physical pages, this should improve the
> performance.
>
> About the guest drivers, windows 7 and vista sp1 introduced some new models
> that should be even faster than kvm's implementation.
>
>
>


-- 
Fedora && Debian User, former Ubuntu User
My Page: http://www.liangsuilong.info
Fedora Project Contributor -- Packager && Ambassador
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Liangsuilong
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/attachments/20101019/892af571/attachment.html>