[RFC Patch 0/7] kernel: Introduce multikernel architecture support

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2025 at 12:42:23PM -0700, Cong Wang wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 12:03 PM Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks, that gives a nice overview!
> >
> > I/O Resource Allocation part will be interesting. Restructuring existing
> > device drivers to allow spawned kernels to use specific hardware queues
> > could be a lot of work and very device-specific. I guess a small set of
> > devices can be supported initially and then it can grow over time.
> 
> My idea is to leverage existing technologies like XDP, which
> offers huge benefits here:
> 
> 1) It is based on shared memory (although it is virtual)
> 
> 2) Its API's are user-space API's, which is even stronger for
> kernel-to-kernel sharing, this possibly avoids re-inventing
> another protocol.
> 
> 3) It provides eBPF.
> 
> 4) The spawned kernel does not require any hardware knowledge,
> just pure XDP-ringbuffer-based software logic.
> 
> But it also has limitations:
> 
> 1) xdp_md is too specific for networking, extending it to storage
> could be very challenging. But we could introduce a SDP for
> storage to just mimic XDP.
> 
> 2) Regardless, we need a doorbell anyway. IPI is handy, but
> I hope we could have an even lighter one. Or more ideally,
> redirecting the hardware queue IRQ into each target CPU.

I see. I was thinking that spawned kernels would talk directly to the
hardware. Your idea of using a software interface is less invasive but
has an overhead similar to paravirtualized devices.

A software approach that supports a wider range of devices is
virtio_vdpa (drivers/vdpa/). The current virtio_vdpa implementation
assumes that the device is located in the same kernel. A
kernel-to-kernel bridge would be needed so that the spawned kernel
forwards the vDPA operations to the other kernel. The other kernel
provides the virtio-net, virtio-blk, etc device functionality by passing
requests to a netdev, blkdev, etc.

There are in-kernel simulator devices for virtio-net and virtio-blk in
drivers/vdpa/vdpa_sim/ which can be used as a starting point. These
devices are just for testing and would need to be fleshed out to become
useful for real workloads.

I have CCed Jason Wang, who maintains vDPA, in case you want to discuss
it more.

> 
> >
> > This also reminds me of VFIO/mdev devices, which would be another
> > solution to the same problem, but equally device-specific and also a lot
> > of work to implement the devices that spawned kernels see.
> 
> Right.
> 
> I prototyped VFIO on my side with AI, but failed with its complex PCI
> interface. And the spawn kernel still requires hardware knowledge
> to interpret PCI BAR etc..

Yeah, it's complex and invasive. :/

Stefan
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