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Huh -- why is Amazon introducing ENA as a paravirtual virtual device? They already provide Xen netdevs to VMs. The Xen PV device would be able to use the (more
by tevenian 10y ago
Huh -- why is Amazon introducing ENA as a paravirtual virtual device? They already provide Xen netdevs to VMs.
The Xen PV device would be able to use the (more efficient) xen bus/event channels for interrupts vs. ENA (MSI-x, by looking at their driver on the Linux netdev mailing list).
The Xen PV device already also supports multiple queues for xmit, see netback_init() in netback.c.
2. The ENA LLQ interface (pushing short packets via CPU write-combiner writes) only makes sense when you are writing to a physical PCI-e/Hypertransport/QPI device.
I suspect that this ENA NIC is at least partly implemented in silicon/firmware rather than dom0 s/w.
Perhaps something like Azure's smart NICs? (SIGCOMM 2015 keynote)