RE: [RFC PATCH 2/2] macvtap: TX zero copy between guest and hostkernel

[Xin, Xiaohui]

>From: Michael S. Tsirkin [mailto:mst@xxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 5:59 PM
>To: Xin, Xiaohui
>Cc: Shirley Ma; Arnd Bergmann; Avi Kivity; David Miller; netdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
>kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] macvtap: TX zero copy between guest and host kernel
>
>On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:46:02AM +0800, Xin, Xiaohui wrote:
>> >From: Michael S. Tsirkin [mailto:mst@xxxxxxxxxx]
>> >Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 12:30 AM
>> >To: Shirley Ma
>> >Cc: Arnd Bergmann; Avi Kivity; Xin, Xiaohui; David Miller; netdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
>> >kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] macvtap: TX zero copy between guest and host kernel
>> >
>> >On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 09:00:25AM -0700, Shirley Ma wrote:
>> >> On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 17:22 +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>> >> > I would expect this to hurt performance significantly.
>> >> > We could do this for asynchronous requests only to avoid the
>> >> > slowdown.
>> >>
>> >> Is kiocb in sendmsg helpful here? It is not used now.
>> >>
>> >> Shirley
>> >
>> >Precisely. This is what the patch from Xin Xiaohui does.  That code
>> >already seems to do most of what you are trying to do, right?
>> >
>> >The main thing missing seems to be macvtap integration, so that we can fall back
>> >on data copy if zero copy is unavailable?
>> >How hard would it be to basically link the mp and macvtap modules
>> >together to get us this functionality? Anyone?
>> >
>> Michael,
>> Is to support macvtap with zero-copy through mp device the functionality
>> you mentioned above?
>
>I have trouble parsing the above question.  At some point Arnd suggested
>that the mp device functionality would fit nicely as part of the macvtap
>driver.  It seems to make sense superficially, the advantage if it
>worked would be that we would get zero copy (mostly) transparently.
>
>Do you agree with this goal?
>

I would say yes.

>> Before Shirley Ma has suggested to move the zero-copy functionality into
>> tun/tap device or macvtap device. How do you think about that?
>> I suspect
>> there will be a lot of duplicate code in that three drivers except we can extract
>> code of zero-copy into kernel APIs and vhost APIs.
>
>
>tap would be very hard at this point as it does not bind to a device.
>macvtap might work, we mainly need to figure out a way to detect that
>device can do zero copy so the right mode is used.  I think a first step
>could be to simply link mp code into macvtap module, pass necessary
>ioctls on, then move some code around as necessary.  This might get rid
>of code duplication nicely.

I'll look into this to see how much effort would be.

>
>
>> Do you think that's worth to do and help current process which is blocked too
>> long than I expected?
>
>I think it's nice to have.
>
>And if done hopefully this will get the folk working on the macvtap
>driver to review the code, which will help find all issues faster.
>
>I think if you post some performance numbers,
>this will also help get people excited and looking at the code.
>

The performance data I have posted before is compared with raw socket on vhost-net.
But currently, the raw socket backend is removed from the qemu side.
So I can only compare with tap on vhost-net. But unfortunately, I missed something
that I even can't bring it up. I was blocked by this for a time.

>I also don't see the process as completely blocked, each review round points
>out more issues: we aren't going back and forth changing
>same lines again and again, are we?
>
>One thing that might help is increase the frequency of updates,
>try sending them out sooner.
>On the other hand 10 new patches each revision is a lot:
>if there is a part of patchset that has stabilised you can split it out,
>post once and keep posting the changing part separately.
>
>I hope these suggestions help.

Thanks, Michael!

>
>> >
>> >--
>> >MST
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