Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Eliminate the no-SIMD en/decryption fallbacks on x86

[Herbert Xu]

Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The patchset can also be retrieved from:
> 
>    git fetch https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiggers/linux.git x86-softirq-fpu-fix-v1
> 
> This patchset fixes a longstanding issue where kernel-mode FPU (i.e.,
> SIMD) was not reliably usable in softirqs in x86, which was creating the
> need for a fallback.  The fallback was really bad for performance, and
> it even hurt performance for users that never encountered the edge case
> where kernel-mode FPU was not usable.

Great work!
 
> I also benchmarked bidirectional IPsec, which has been claimed to often
> hit the edge case where kernel-mode FPU was previously not usable in
> softirq context.  Ultimately, I was not actually able to reproduce that
> edge case being reached unless I reduced the number of CPUs to 1, in
> which case it then started being occasionally reached.  Regardless, even
> without that case being reached, IPsec throughput still improved by 2%.
> In situations where that case was being reached, or where users required
> a synchronous algorithm, a much larger improvement should be seen.

You would need a situation where your CPU is maxed out by your
bandwidth, so on a physical box these days you would need 10GbE
at the minimum.

However, I used to be able to easily reproduce this using virtualisation
because there the bandwidth is essentially unlimited.  So perhaps
a KVM guest with a single CPU doing bidirection IPsec to the host
should be enough to reproduce this case.

Thanks,
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
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