Internships/ProjectIdeas/VhostUserBlkDeviceBackend

vhost-user-blk device backend

Summary: Implement a vhost-user-blk device backend inside QEMU so guests can efficiently access shared disk images.

QEMU can connect virtio-blk disks to external processes that act as vhost-user-blk device backends. This makes it possible for QEMU guests to access disks managed by SPDK or other software-defined storage appliances.

QEMU itself does not offer a vhost-user-blk device backend although the QEMU block layer has a number of features that make QEMU desirable as a software-defined storage appliance in its own right. For example, multiple VMs could safely access a shared qcow2 disk image file with one of the QEMUs acting as the vhost-user-blk device backend. Today this is can be worked around using QEMU's NBD support, but its performance will always be lower since it is a network protocol.

The goal is to add a vhost-user-blk device backend to QEMU so that disks can be exported to other processes. The following steps are necessary:

• Understand libvhost-user, QEMU's library for implementing vhost-user device backends
• Add a QEMU monitor command for instantiating vhost-user-blk device backends given a blockdev and a UNIX domain socket
• Add a QEMU monitor command for shutting down and removing vhost-user-blk device backends
• Implement a vhost-user-blk device backend using libvhost-user (see the vhost-user-blk.c stand-alone example below)
• Extend QEMU's vhost-user tests to take advantage of your vhost-user-blk device backend

Links:

• libvhost-user
• vhost-user-blk.c stand-alone example
• vhost-user protocol

Details:

• Skill level: intermediate
• Language: C
• Mentor: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> ("kwolf" on IRC), Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com> ("stefanha" on IRC)