Hi,
Pratyush and I have been working on the virtio drivers. The virtio-blk
driver is ready for more testing and eyes looking at the code. The
virtio-net driver is still in progress.
I can't guarantee it won't panic your system, but it has survived a
couple hours of "fsstress" testing.
Here's some simple DD-based performance numbers compared with an
emulated IDE driver:
http://img507.imageshack.us/i/write.jpg
http://img195.imageshack.us/f/readf.jpg
You can find the code at:
http://gitorious.org/virtio-drivers
The wiki has some notes about it: installing, architecture, porting
notes, etc:
http://gitorious.org/virtio-drivers/pages/Home
Thanks,
Tim