Re: [PATCH net] Revert "vhost: cache used event for better performance"

[Jason Wang]

On 2017å07æ30æ 14:26, K. Den wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-07-26 at 19:08 +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 09:37:15PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> > > On 2017å07æ26æ 21:18, Jason Wang wrote:
> > > > On 2017å07æ26æ 20:57, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 04:03:17PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> > > > > > This reverts commit 809ecb9bca6a9424ccd392d67e368160f8b76c92. Since it
> > > > > > was reported to break vhost_net. We want to cache used event and use
> > > > > > it to check for notification. We try to valid cached used event by
> > > > > > checking whether or not it was ahead of new, but this is not correct
> > > > > > all the time, it could be stale and there's no way to know about this.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Signed-off-by: Jason Wang<jasowang@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > > > Could you supply a bit more data here please?  How does it get stale?
> > > > > What does guest need to do to make it stale?  This will be helpful if
> > > > > anyone wants to bring it back, or if we want to extend the protocol.
> > > > The problem we don't know whether or not guest has published a new used
> > > > event. The check vring_need_event(vq->last_used_event, new + vq->num,
> > > > new) is not sufficient to check for this.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks
> > > More notes, the previous assumption is that we don't move used event back,
> > > but this could happen in fact if idx is wrapper around.
> > You mean if the 16 bit index wraps around after 64K entries.
> > Makes sense.
> >
> > > Will repost and add
> > > this into commit log.
> > >
> > > Thanks
> Hi,

Hi, sorry for the late reply, was on vacation last week.

> I am just curious but I have got a question:
> AFAIU, if you wanted to keep the caching mechanism alive in the code base,
> the following two changes could clear off the issue, or not?:
> (1) Always fetch the latest event value from guest when signalled_used event is
> invalid, which includes last_used_idx wraps-around case. Otherwise we might need
> changes which would complicate too much the logic to properly decide whether or
> not to skip signalling in the next vhost_notify round.
> (2) On top of that, split the signal-postponing logic to three cases like:
> * if the interval of vq.num is [2^16, UINT_MAX]:
> any cached event is in should-postpone-signalling interval, so paradoxically
> must always do signalling.

I think don't think current code can work well if vq.num is grater than 
2^15. Since all cached idx is u16. This looks like a bug which needs to 
be fixed.

> * else if the interval of vq.num is [2^15, 2^16):
> the logic in the original patch (809ecb9bca6a9) suffices
> * else (= less than 2^15) (optional):
> checking only (vring_need_event(vq->last_used_event, new + vq->num, new)
> would suffice.
>
> Am I missing something, or is this irrelevant?

Looks not, I think this may work. Let me do some test.

Thanks

> I would appreciate if you could elaborate a bit more how the situation where
> event idx wraps around and moves back would make trouble.
>
> Thanks.