Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932354Ab2JDBYy (ORCPT ); Wed, 3 Oct 2012 21:24:54 -0400 Received: from mail-ob0-f174.google.com ([209.85.214.174]:61945 "EHLO mail-ob0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754830Ab2JDBYv (ORCPT ); Wed, 3 Oct 2012 21:24:51 -0400 From: Anthony Liguori To: Rusty Russell , "Michael S. Tsirkin" , Thomas Lendacky Cc: Sasha Levin , virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, avi@redhat.com, kvm@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] virtio-net: inline header support In-Reply-To: <87vces2gxq.fsf@rustcorp.com.au> References: <87vces2gxq.fsf@rustcorp.com.au> User-Agent: Notmuch/0.13.2+93~ged93d79 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2012 20:24:47 -0500 Message-ID: <87mx033u74.fsf@codemonkey.ws> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1534 Lines: 42 Rusty Russell writes: > "Michael S. Tsirkin" writes: > >> Thinking about Sasha's patches, we can reduce ring usage >> for virtio net small packets dramatically if we put >> virtio net header inline with the data. >> This can be done for free in case guest net stack allocated >> extra head room for the packet, and I don't see >> why would this have any downsides. > > I've been wanting to do this for the longest time... but... > >> Even though with my recent patches qemu >> no longer requires header to be the first s/g element, >> we need a new feature bit to detect this. >> A trivial qemu patch will be sent separately. > > There's a reason I haven't done this. I really, really dislike "my > implemention isn't broken" feature bits. We could have an infinite > number of them, for each bug in each device. This is a bug in the specification. The QEMU implementation pre-dates the specification. All of the actual implementations of virtio relied on the semantics of s/g elements and still do. What's in the specification really doesn't matter when it doesn't agree with all of the existing implementations. Users use implementations, not specifications. The specification really ought to be changed here. Regards, Anthony Liguori -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/