VSOCK support

VSOCK provides a way for guest and host to communicate through a socket. cloud-hypervisor only supports stream VSOCK sockets.

The virtio-vsock is based on the Firecracker implementation, where additional details can be found.

What is a CID?

CID is a 32-bit context identifier describing the source or destination. In combination with the port, the complete addressing can be achieved to describe multiple listeners running on the same machine.

The table below depicts the well known CID values:

CID	Description
-1	Random CID
0	Hypervisor
1	Loopback
2	Host

Prerequisites

Kernel Requirements

Host kernel: CONFIG_VHOST_VSOCK

Guest kernel: CONFIG_VIRTIO_VSOCKETS

Nested VM support

Linux v5.5 or newer is required for the L1 VM.

Loopback support

Linux v5.6 or newer is required.

Establishing VSOCK Connection

VSOCK device becomes available with --vsock option passed by the VM start. Cloud Hypervisor can be invoked for instance as below:

cloud-hypervisor \
	--cpus boot=1 \
	--memory size=4G \
	--firmware CLOUDHV.fd \
	--disk path=jammy-server-cloudimg.raw \
	--vsock cid=3,socket=/tmp/ch.vsock

The examples use socat >=1.7.4 to illustrate the VSOCK functionality. However, there are other tools supporting VSOCK, like ncat.

Connecting from Host to Guest

The guest starts to listen on the defined port:

$ socat - VSOCK-LISTEN:1234

Once the guest is listening, the host can send data:

`echo -e "CONNECT 1234\nHello from host!" | socat - UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/ch.vsock

Note the string CONNECT <port> prepended to the actual data. It is possible for the guest to start listening on different ports, thus the specific command is needed to instruct VSOCK to which listener the host wants to connect. It needs to be sent once per connection. Once the connection established, data transfers can take place directly.

Connecting from Guest to Host

This first requires a listening UNIX socket on the host side. The UNIX socket path has to be constructed by using the socket path used at the VM launch time with appended _ and the port number to be used on the guest side. As in the example above, if we'd intended to connect from the guest to the port 1234, the Unix socket path on the host side would be /tmp/ch.vsock_1234.

Also note that the CID used on the guest side is the well known CID value 2.

Listening on the host side:

$ socat - UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/ch.vsock_1234

From the guest:

$ echo -e "Hello from guest!" | socat - VSOCK-CONNECT:2:1234

Links

virtio-vsock in QEMU, Firecracker and Linux: Status, Performance and Challenges
Leveraging virtio-vsock in the cloud and containers
VSOCK man page
https://stefano-garzarella.github.io/posts/2020-02-20-vsock-nested-vms-loopback/
https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main/docs/vsock.md

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