VSOCK: From Convenience to Performant VirtIO Communication
summary
VSOCK gains datagram support and shows concrete wins: in virtio-over-vhost tests (8 vCPUs, one sender thread per vCPU, 1 RX/1 TX queue per CPU, equal buffer space) VSOCK datagrams deliver almost double throughput versus UDP across 64–4K payloads, with send-path latency much smaller; tests note a troubling 300 microsecond workq delay that still needs fixing. Integration of sockmap zero-copy potential reduces user/kernel copies and CPU, and datagram+sockmap prototypes work and are under upstream review.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and speakers
- 0:22Background and usage of VSOCK
- 3:14VSOCK architecture and flow
- 6:53VSOCK protocol explained
- 10:48Performance characteristics of VSOCK
- 14:23Datagram support for VSOCK
- 24:29Sock map for VSOCK
- 29:36Summary and future work
- 30:20Q&A: High-throughput use cases
- 31:25Q&A: Zero-copy and IOU ring
- 32:51Q&A: User space interface
- 35:40Q&A: Latency testing tools
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