Fred Liu <Fred_Liu@...> writes: > > Thanks for the clarification. > Intel 82576 nic has been released for more one year, it will be easier and easier to find. > I/O performance bottleneck is really the barrier to deploy virtualization confidently. > KVM and XEN is sort of ahead of VBOX in this aspect. > > Thanks. > > Fred > > -----Original Message----- > From: Alexey Eromenko [mailto:al4321@...] > Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 10:54 PM > To: Fred Liu > Cc: vbox-dev@... > Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] Any plan to support SR-IOV? > > On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Fred Liu <Fred_Liu@...> wrote: > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Fred Liu > > Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 1:53 PM > > To: vbox-dev@... > > Subject: Any plan to support SR-IOV? > > > > SR-IOV is a host technology, not a hypervisor one. > > What hypervisor should support is VT-d, then SR-IOV gets supported > automatically. > > There were few commits in the VBox source tree with regards to VT-d > support, but it looks like very early status. > In Addition, Hardware is too scarse to test it for community members to help. >
Fred, I should start off by stating that I work at Intel in the LAN Access Division. I am responsible for 10Gb Ethernet and Virtualization technologies like SR-IOV on Intel(R) Ethernet Controllers. SR-IOV-capable devices provide configurable numbers of independent VFs, each with its own PCI Configuration space. The VMM assigns one or more VF to a virtual machine. Memory Translation technologies such as those in Intel® VT-x and Intel® VT-d provide hardware assisted techniques to allow direct DMA transfers to and from the VM, thus bypassing the software switch in the VMM. The Intel(R) 82599 Ethernet Controllers and Intel(R) 82576 Ethernet Controllers support SR-IOV and can be found on a wide selection of adapters and as LOMs on many server boards. The 82576 is our 1Gb part and provides up to 8 VFs and 82599 is our 10Gb part with up to 64 VFs. To use SR-IOV you need to have VT-d enabled in the server BIOS like the previous post stated BUT you also need to have an SR-IOV enabled BIOS. Some server support VT-d but do not support SR-IOV because the BIOS does not setup the PCI config space for the VFs. Several server OEMs offer systems that have SR-IOV enabled, such as the Dell R710 and R910 and most of the current Intel Server Boards and Systems. I know that other systems have been enabled with the SR-IOV BOIS so please check your server model and BIOS version before trying to setup SR-IOV. Ecosystem Requirements taken from Patrick Kutch's PCI-SIG SR-IOV Primer Revision 2.5 -- http://download.intel.com/design/network/applnots/321211.pdf BIOS The BIOS performs a role in partitioning Memory Mapped I/O and PCI Express Bus numbers between host bridges. In many systems, mechanisms for allocating PCI resources to the host bridges are not standardized and software relies on the BIOS to configure these devices with sufficient memory space and bus ranges to support I/O devices in the hierarchy beneath each host bridge. BIOS enumeration code needs to be enhanced to recognize SR-IOV devices so that enough MMIO (Memory Mapped IO) space is allocated to encompass the requirements of VFs. Refer to the PCI-SIG SR-IOV specification for details on how to parse PCI Config space and calculate the maximum amount of VF MMIO space required. Here are some other links that a Patrick and I have put together. Here is a link to a Video that Patrick Kutch did explaining how SR-IOV works – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHsk8Nycdg Here is a link to more technical resources that Patrick has regarding SR-IOV. http://communities.intel.com/people/Patrick_Kutch?view=overview Thanks, Brian Johnson Intel Corp _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
