Re: [bug report] iommu_dma_unmap_sg() is very slow then running IO from remote numa node

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Fri Jul 09 2021 - 08:34:21 EST


On 2021-07-09 12:04, John Garry wrote:
On 09/07/2021 11:26, Robin Murphy wrote:
n 2021-07-09 09:38, Ming Lei wrote:
Hello,

I observed that NVMe performance is very bad when running fio on one
CPU(aarch64) in remote numa node compared with the nvme pci numa node.

Please see the test result[1] 327K vs. 34.9K.

Latency trace shows that one big difference is in iommu_dma_unmap_sg(),
1111 nsecs vs 25437 nsecs.

Are you able to dig down further into that? iommu_dma_unmap_sg() itself doesn't do anything particularly special, so whatever makes a difference is probably happening at a lower level, and I suspect there's probably an SMMU involved. If for instance it turns out to go all the way down to __arm_smmu_cmdq_poll_until_consumed() because polling MMIO from the wrong node is slow, there's unlikely to be much you can do about that other than the global "go faster" knobs (iommu.strict and iommu.passthrough) with their associated compromises.

There was also the disable_msipolling option:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/iommu/arm/arm-smmu-v3/arm-smmu-v3.c#n42

But I am not sure if that platform even supports MSI polling (or has smmu v3).

Hmm, I suppose in principle the MSI polling path could lead to a bit of cacheline ping-pong with the SMMU fetching and writing back to the sync command, but I'd rather find out more details of where exactly the extra time is being spent in this particular situation than speculate much further.

You could also try iommu.forcedac=1 cmdline option. But I doubt it will help since the issue was mentioned to be NUMA related.

Plus that shouldn't make any difference to unmaps anyway.

[1] fio test & results

1) fio test result:

- run fio on local CPU
taskset -c 0 ~/git/tools/test/nvme/io_uring 10 1 /dev/nvme1n1 4k
+ fio --bs=4k --ioengine=io_uring --fixedbufs --registerfiles --hipri --iodepth=64 --iodepth_batch_submit=16 --iodepth_batch_complete_min=16 --filename=/dev/nvme1n1 --direct=1 --runtime=10 --numjobs=1 --rw=randread --name=test --group_reporting

IOPS: 327K
avg latency of iommu_dma_unmap_sg(): 1111 nsecs


- run fio on remote CPU
taskset -c 80 ~/git/tools/test/nvme/io_uring 10 1 /dev/nvme1n1 4k
+ fio --bs=4k --ioengine=io_uring --fixedbufs --registerfiles --hipri --iodepth=64 --iodepth_batch_submit=16 --iodepth_batch_complete_min=16 --filename=/dev/nvme1n1 --direct=1 --runtime=10 --numjobs=1 --rw=randread --name=test --group_reporting

IOPS: 34.9K
avg latency of iommu_dma_unmap_sg(): 25437 nsecs

2) system info
[root@ampere-mtjade-04 ~]# lscpu | grep NUMA
NUMA node(s):                    2
NUMA node0 CPU(s):               0-79
NUMA node1 CPU(s):               80-159

lspci | grep NVMe
0003:01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983

[root@ampere-mtjade-04 ~]# cat /sys/block/nvme1n1/device/device/numa_node

Since it's ampere, I guess it's smmu v3.

BTW, if you remember, I did raise a performance issue of smmuv3 with NVMe before:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iommu/b2a6e26d-6d0d-7f0d-f222-589812f701d2@xxxxxxxxxx/

It doesn't seem like the best-case throughput is of concern in this case though, and my hunch is that a ~23x discrepancy in SMMU unmap performance depending on locality probably isn't specific to NVMe.

Robin.

I did have this series to improve performance for systems with lots of CPUs, like above, but not accepted:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iommu/1598018062-175608-1-git-send-email-john.garry@xxxxxxxxxx/

Thanks,
John