[vbox-dev] is virtstor being implemented?

[Huihong Luo]

we impemented seamless taskbar mode in vmlite, released 2 months ago. Single app can display on host, with shell folder redirection, i.e., vm app sees host's Desktop, My Documents, .... you can take a look.
 
We have used lots of our application virtualization code, still trying to figure out what can be open sourced to vbox.

--- On Tue, 10/19/10, Liang Suilong <liangsuilong at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Liang Suilong <liangsuilong at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] is virtstor being implemented?
To: "Achim Hasenmüller" <achim.hasenmueller at oracle.com>
Cc: "Huihong Luo" <huisinro at yahoo.com>, "Alexey Eromenko" <al4321 at gmail.com>, vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 8:50 AM


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.





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