Virtio for PCI Endpoint Subsystem in Linux Kernel - Manivannan Sadhasivam, Linaro Ltd

Don't miss out! Join us at the next Open Source Summit in Hyderabad, India (August 5); Amsterdam, Netherland (August 25-29); Seoul, South Korea (November 4-5). Join us at the premier vendor-neutral open source conference, where developers and technologists come together to collaborate, share knowledge, and explore the latest innovations and advancements in open source technology. Learn more at https://events.linuxfoundation.org/ Virtio for PCI Endpoint Subsystem in Linux Kernel - Manivannan Sadhasivam, Linaro Ltd Traditionally, Virtio is primarily used in virtualized environments to allow the Hypervisor to Guest communication in an agnostic way. But Virtio as a standard can be leveraged outside virtualization for communication between any two entities. The PCI Endpoint subsystem in the Linux kernel is used to run Linux on tiny PCI endpoint devices such as modems, NIC, GPU, etc... It requires the developers to write function drivers to communicate with the host. On most occasions, these function drivers also require counterpart drivers on the host systems. This increases the time required for the project's development, as the development needs to happen on both the host and endpoint systems. This is where Virtio comes in handy for the PCI Endpoint subsystem. With Virtio, developers can focus on developing the back-end drivers on the endpoint side and leverage the existing front-end drivers on host systems (such as virt-net, virt-gpu, etc...). In this talk, Manivannan Sadhasivam will present the proposals received from the community for adding Virtio backend support to the PCI Endpoint subsystem and elaborate on the one that got a consensus to move forward, along with the future plans.