Re: [PATCH] virtio-ring: Use threshold for switching to indirectdescriptors

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:33:16AM +0200, Sasha Levin wrote:
> Currently if VIRTIO_RING_F_INDIRECT_DESC is enabled we will use indirect
> descriptors even if we have plenty of space in the ring. This means that
> we take a performance hit at all times due to the overhead of creating
> indirect descriptors.

Is it the overhead of creating them or just allocating the pages?

The logic you propose is basically add direct as long as
the ring is mostly empty. So if the problem is in allocations,
one simple optimization for this one workload is add a small
cache of memory to use for indirect bufs. Of course building
a good API for this is where we got blocked in the past...

> With this patch, we will use indirect descriptors only if we have less than
> either 16, or 12% of the total amount of descriptors available.

One notes that this to some level conflicts with patches that change
virtio net not to drain the vq before add buf, in that we are
required here to drain the vq to avoid indirect.

Not necessarily a serious problem, but something to keep in mind:
a memory pool would not have this issue.

> 
> I did basic performance benchmark on virtio-net with vhost enabled.
> 
> Before:
> 	Recv   Send    Send
> 	Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed
> 	Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput
> 	bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec
> 
> 	 87380  16384  16384    10.00    4563.92
> 
> After:
> 	Recv   Send    Send
> 	Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed
> 	Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput
> 	bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec
> 
> 	 87380  16384  16384    10.00    5353.28

Is this with the kvm tool? what kind of benchmark is this?

Need to verify the effect on block too, and do some more
benchmarks. In particular we are making the ring
in effect smaller, how will this affect small packet perf
with multiple streams?


A very simple test is to disable indirect buffers altogether.
qemu-kvm has a flag for this.
Is this an equivalent test?
If yes I'll try that.


> Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: kvm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c |   12 ++++++++++--
>  1 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c b/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c
> index c7a2c20..5e0ce15 100644
> --- a/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c
> +++ b/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c
> @@ -82,6 +82,7 @@ struct vring_virtqueue
>  
>  	/* Host supports indirect buffers */
>  	bool indirect;

We can get rid of bool indirect now, just set indirect_threshold to 0,
right?

> +	unsigned int indirect_threshold;

Please add a comment. It should be something like
'Min. number of free space in the ring to trigger direct descriptor use'

>  
>  	/* Host publishes avail event idx */
>  	bool event;
> @@ -176,8 +177,9 @@ int virtqueue_add_buf_gfp(struct virtqueue *_vq,
>  	BUG_ON(data == NULL);
>  
>  	/* If the host supports indirect descriptor tables, and we have multiple
> -	 * buffers, then go indirect. FIXME: tune this threshold */
> -	if (vq->indirect && (out + in) > 1 && vq->num_free) {
> +	 * buffers, then go indirect. */
> +	if (vq->indirect && (out + in) > 1 &&
> +	   (vq->num_free < vq->indirect_threshold)) {

If num_free is 0, this will allocate the buffer which is
not a good idea.

I think there's a regression here: with a small vq, we could
previously put in an indirect descriptor, with your patch
add_buf will fail. I think this is a real problem for block
which was the original reason indirect bufs were introduced.


>  		head = vring_add_indirect(vq, sg, out, in, gfp);
>  		if (likely(head >= 0))
>  			goto add_head;
> @@ -485,6 +487,12 @@ struct virtqueue *vring_new_virtqueue(unsigned int num,
>  #endif
>  
>  	vq->indirect = virtio_has_feature(vdev, VIRTIO_RING_F_INDIRECT_DESC);
> +	/*
> +	 * Use indirect descriptors only when we have less than either 12%
> +	 * or 16 of the descriptors in the ring available.
> +	 */
> +	if (vq->indirect)
> +		vq->indirect_threshold = max(16U, num >> 3);

Let's add some defines at top of the file please, maybe even
a module parameter.

>  	vq->event = virtio_has_feature(vdev, VIRTIO_RING_F_EVENT_IDX);
>  
>  	/* No callback?  Tell other side not to bother us. */
> -- 
> 1.7.8.rc3
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