[Call for testers] FreeBSD VirtIO Network Driver

Hi.

I'd like to present the network VirtIO driver I've been working on for
the last few months in my spare time. It is not based on the NetBSD code
that is floating around. The attached patch should apply to both recent
-current and -stable. Early development was done on VirtualBox,
but most has been done on KVM/QEMU.

While still a work in progress, the network is mostly feature complete
with checksum offloading, TSO, etc, with a couple of caveats:

 - The VirtIO checksum offload interface doesn't map well to FreeBSD's
offloading interface. The network driver is forced to peek inside the
incoming/outgoing frames to set the appropriate flags. This could be
make more robust with regards to IPv6.

 - Per Rx/Tx locking needs to be implemented before LRO can happen.

 - Tx completion interrupts could be basically eliminated when the
host supports a certain virtqueue feature. I have a patch that does
just that, but haven't had a chance to really test it.

I haven't done any real performance testing yet, but here's some
informal iperf results between the emulated e1000 device and the
VirtIO device on FreeBSD. The host is Fedora 14 running
2.6.35.10-72.fc14.x86_64/qemu-kvm-0.13.0-1.fc14.x86_64. The Linux
guest is debain-testing (2.6.32-5-amd64) with a VirtIO network device.
The FreeBSD guest is amd64 8-STABLE with both an e1000 and VirtIO
network interfaces. Both guests are running on the same host, and the
MTU of all interfaces was 1500. Measurements are in Mbits/sec.

FreeBSD --> Linux
x e1000
+ vtnet
   N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x   6           340           358           348     347.66667     6.2822501
+   6          1529          1540          1538     1535.3333     4.3665394
Difference at 95.0% confidence
       1187.67 +/- 6.95891
       341.611% +/- 2.0016%
       (Student's t, pooled s = 5.40987)

Linux --> FreeBSD
x e1000
+ vtnet
   N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x  11           437           456           449     447.36364     6.4385204
+  11           669           679           671     673.27273     3.5802488
Difference at 95.0% confidence
       225.909 +/- 4.6335
       50.4979% +/- 1.03573%
       (Student's t, pooled s = 5.20926)

I imagine the lack of LRO makes the FreeBSD receiving results less
impressive. Performance is not up to where Linux <--> Linux is at.

To use, after applying the patch and compiling, you'll need to load
the virtio, virtio_pci, and if_vtnet kernel modules. The virtio module
contains the virtqueue transport and a bit of glue code. The
virtio_pci module implements the VirtIO PCI interface for device
probing and communication with the host. The if_vtnet module
contains the network driver.

I have a partially complete VirtIO block driver. Hopefully it will be
ready for wider testing in a couple of weeks.

I'm going to be away from my computer for the next couple of days,
I'll get to any email after then.