RE: virtual networking in l4ka::pistachio

Hello Ashish,

There exist basically two approaches: 

One approach is based on the concept of reusing Linux drivers (for details,
see the paper http://l4ka.org/publications/paper.php?docid=1208). In short,
we bring up a dedicated driver VM (similar to Dom0) and then connect the
Linux bridging and driver logic with the guest VMs by means of hand-written
emulation and glue code.

The other approach is to implement a native virtual switch and drivers based
on L4's microkernel concepts (threads, address spaces, IRQ abstraction). The
disadvantage here is the additional porting effort, the advantage is a
substantially lower memory and CPU footprint compared to the heavy-weight
driver VM approach.

The afterburner currently implements both approaches for virtual networking,
check out the directories l4ka-driver-reuse and l4ka-driver-native in the
repository.

-Jan 

--
Jan Stoess
System Architecture Group
University of Karlsruhe
Phone: +49 (721) 608-4056
Fax: +49 (721) 608-7664
eMail: [email protected]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]
> karlsruhe.de] On Behalf Of Ashish Bijlani
> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 11:29 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: virtual networking in l4ka::pistachio
> 
> Hi,
> 
> How is virtual networking implemented in pistachio? Can one VM ping
> another VM over a shared memory channel as in Xen?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ashish