NetBSD virtio drivers performance

[Emmanuel Kasper <emmanuel%libera.cc@localhost>]

Hello

I have a VPS machine hosted by a KVM ( Linux Kernel Virtual Machine ) 
hoster in Germany which I am running happily since two years now a 
NetBSD system.


I stumbled by chance on the fact that NetBSD 6 has virtio drivers ( by 
reading a post ... announcin a gsoc project to port them to 
DragonFlyBSD: 
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/stephanie_ouillon), 
so I decided to benchmark the virtio block driver with bonnie++.

The raw results are here (with BETA_2 binaries )

http://pastebin.com/ZMgwHp58

I tryed to concentrate myself on block writing performance, by using 
sync mounts on the host, and I got reprocible results by trunning the 
bonnie++ test three times in a row.

So short said , with the virtio driver, NetBSD writes at 25MB/s and 
without it only 7MB/s.

However i noticed the inclusion of this driver was quite confidential 
since I haven't found it in the list of changes:
http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-6.0.html
Shouldn't it be here as well ?

Greets

Emmanuel