VIRTIO-USER: A New Versatile Channel for Kernel-Bypass Networks

Kernel-Bypass Networks still faces some challenging problems: (1) it's hard for container to gain better performance by kernel-bypass virtual switch; (2) it lacks stable and efficient way to inject packets back to kernel stack for kernel-bypass network interface. To solve the above problems, we propose VIRTIO-USER, as a versatile, performant, secure and standardized channel. Instead of using hypervisor to bridge the frontend and backend driver, we implement an embedded vhost adapter in frontend driver to communicate with vhost backend directly. It keeps other mechanisms like memory sharing model, ring layout and feature negotiation, in the same way with VIRTIO. We implement and upstream it into DPDK. In comparison with kernel-based container networking and existing exception path solution, our evaluation shows +3.5x performance boost in both scenarios.