virtio: indirect ring entries (VIRTIO_RING_F_INDIRECT_DESC)

Add a new feature flag for indirect ring entries. These are ring
entries which point to a table of buffer descriptors.

The idea here is to increase the ring capacity by allowing a larger
effective ring size whereby the ring size dictates the number of
requests that may be outstanding, rather than the size of those
requests.

This should be most effective in the case of block I/O where we can
potentially benefit by concurrently dispatching a large number of
large requests. Even in the simple case of single segment block
requests, this results in a threefold increase in ring capacity.

Signed-off-by: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
2 files changed