Open Source Summit Europe + ELC Europe 2017

As many guests use virtio for all their IO needs, the performance of virtio puts a hard limit on the system performance. virtio is useful as it's a hardware-independent interface - but for some guests, that independence comes at a performance cost. That's why for the last year the virtio community has been looking at different ways to extend virtio - making it work on the underlying hardware better, but without breaking the indepence. This work made us re-examine several underlying assumptions made during early stages of the design of the virtio ring. Some of the findings from this re-examination were surprising; some of the common assumptions are a myth. This presentation is an update on the progress made on the next version of virtio and its future - it will try to dispel some myths and describe some things about virtio that puzzled us and some things we found out that surprised us.