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On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 09:38:38AM +0100, sfinucan at redhat.com wrote:
> On Fri, 2017-04-28 at 13:23 +0900, TETSURO NAKAMURA wrote:
> > Hi Nova team,
> > 
> > I'm writing this e-mail because I'd like to have a discussion about
> > DPDK support at OpenStack Summit in Boston.
> > 
> > We have developed a dpdk-based patch panel named SPP[1], and we'd
> > like to start working on Openstack (ML2 driver) to develop
> > "networking-spp".
> > 
> > Especially, we'd like to use DPDK-ivshmem that was used to be used
> > to create "dpdkr" interface in ovs-dpdk[2].
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, IVSHMEM ports are no longer supported in
> upstream. The documentation for this feature was recently removed from
> OVS [1] stating:
> 
>   - The ivshmem library has been removed in DPDK since DPDK 16.11.
>   - The instructions/scheme provided will not work with current
>     supported and future DPDK versions.
>   - The linked patch needed to enable support in QEMU has never
>     been upstreamed and does not apply to the last 4 QEMU releases.
>   - Userspace vhost has become the defacto OVS-DPDK path to the guest.
> 
> Note: I worked on DPDK vSwitch [2] way back when, and there were severe
> security implications with sharing a chunk of host memory between
> multiple guests (which is how IVSHMEM works). I'm not at all surprised
> the feature was killed.

Security is only one of the issues. Upstream QEMU maintainers considered
the ivshmem device to have a seriously flawed design and discourage anyone
from using it. For anything network related QEMU maintainers strongly
recommand using vhost-user.

IIUC, there is some experimental work to create a virtio based replacement
for ivshmem, for non-network related vm-2-vm communications, but that is
not going to be something usable for a while yet. This however just
reinforces the point that ivshmem is considered obsolete / flawed
technology by QEMU maintainers.

Regards,
Daniel
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