Intel Working On "Virtual Bus" As Generic Way Of Exchanging Data Between Devices/Driver

In addition to Intel IGC network driver performance-boosting TSO support, also queued within Intel's next-queue tree of networking changes is a new software bus called Virtual Bus.

Virtual Bus "Virtbus" is a software-based bus devised by Intel for generic virtbus_devices and virtbus_drivers. Virtbus is lightweight and intended for dealing with the generic devices/drivers wanting to pass chunks of data to other virtbus_device-using devices.

Intel's use-case for this software-based Virtual Bus is for the Linux iRDMA driver needing to connect to different PCI LAN drivers for requesting resources (queues). Intel is working to make those PCI LAN drivers communicate with the iRDMA code via Virtual Bus.

More details can be found via this commit introducing Virtual Bus currently in Intel's next-queue, which could be on the way soon to the networking net-next and then just one step out from being mainlined, potentially for Linux 5.6 should no issues crop up.

Following the actual bus being added to the kernel, a follow-up commit added Virtbus support to the Intel i40e network driver. "It allows to realize a single RDMA driver capable of working with multiple netdev drivers over multi-generation Intel HW supporting RDMA."