VirtIO VSOCK MSG_ZEROCOPY To Begin Landing For Linux 6.7: More Performance

The first of three parts for MSG_ZEROCOPY preparations for the VirtIO-Vsock driver have been queued into net-next ahead of planned introduction in the Linux 6.7 kernel as another means of achieving greater performance within virtual machines.

This message zero-copy support for the VirtIO/Vsock code can allow for nice efficiency gains within VMs. The first part of the patches making the initial preparations was queued into net-next last week. Hopefully the rest of the patches will be reviewed and approved for merging still in time for the 6.7 cycle, which allows for more zero-copy of buffers rather than creating extra copies of buffers on transmissions with the virtio-vsock driver.

Benchmarks on the patch series in full show some very nice gains with buffer sizes at 32KB and larger:

This MSG_ZEROCOPY feature for the VirtIO/Vsock driver is quite interesting for this host/guest communication interface on Linux.