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

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Wed Jul 28 2021 - 11:39:32 EST


On 2021-07-28 16:17, Ming Lei wrote:
On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 11:38:18AM +0100, John Garry wrote:
On 28/07/2021 02:32, Ming Lei wrote:
On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 3:51 PM John Garry<john.garry@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 23/07/2021 11:21, Ming Lei wrote:
Thanks, I was also going to suggest the latter, since it's what
arm_smmu_cmdq_issue_cmdlist() does with IRQs masked that should be most
indicative of where the slowness most likely stems from.
The improvement from 'iommu.strict=0' is very small:

Have you tried turning off the IOMMU to ensure that this is really just
an IOMMU problem?

You can try setting CONFIG_ARM_SMMU_V3=n in the defconfig or passing
cmdline param iommu.passthrough=1 to bypass the the SMMU (equivalent to
disabling for kernel drivers).
Bypassing SMMU via iommu.passthrough=1 basically doesn't make a difference
on this issue.

A ~90% throughput drop still seems to me to be too high to be a software
issue. More so since I don't see similar on my system. And that throughput
drop does not lead to a total CPU usage drop, from the fio log.

Indeed, it now sounds like $SUBJECT has been a complete red herring, and although the SMMU may be reflecting the underlying slowness it is not in fact a significant contributor to it. Presumably perf shows any difference in CPU time moving elsewhere once iommu_dma_unmap_sg() is out of the picture?

Do you know if anyone has run memory benchmark tests on this board to find
out NUMA effect? I think lmbench or stream could be used for this.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YOhbc5C47IzC893B@T590/

Hmm, a ~4x discrepancy in CPU<->memory bandwidth is pretty significant, but it's still not the ~10x discrepancy in NVMe throughput. Possibly CPU<->PCIe and/or PCIe<->memory bandwidth is even further impacted between sockets, or perhaps all the individual latencies just add up - that level of detailed performance analysis is beyond my expertise. Either way I guess it's probably time to take it up with the system vendor to see if there's anything which can be tuned in hardware/firmware.

Robin.