Re: [dpdk-dev] Having troubles binding an SR-IOV VF to uio_pci_generic on Amazon instance

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 01:38:37PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 12:59:47PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On 10/01/2015 12:55 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > >On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 12:22:46PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > >>It's easy to claim that
> > >>a solution is around the corner, only no one was looking for it, but the
> > >>reality is that kernel bypass has been a solution for years for high
> > >>performance users,
> > >I never said that it's trivial.
> > >
> > >It's probably a lot of work. It's definitely more work than just abusing
> > >sysfs.
> > >
> > >But it looks like a write system call into an eventfd is about 1.5
> > >microseconds on my laptop. Even with a system call per packet, system
> > >call overhead is not what makes DPDK drivers outperform Linux ones.
> > >
> > 
> > 1.5 us = 0.6 Mpps per core limit.
> 
> Oh, I calculated it incorrectly. It's 0.15 us. So 6Mpps.
> But for RX, you can batch a lot of packets.
> 
> You can see by now I'm not that good at benchmarking.
> Here's what I wrote:
> 
> 
> #include <stdbool.h>
> #include <sys/eventfd.h>
> #include <inttypes.h>
> #include <unistd.h>
> 
> 
> int main(int argc, char **argv)
> {
>         int e = eventfd(0, 0);
>         uint64_t v = 1;
> 
>         int i;
> 
>         for (i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i) {
>                 write(e, &v, sizeof v);
>         }
> }
> 
> 
> This takes 1.5 seconds to run on my laptop:
> 
> $ time ./a.out 
> 
> real    0m1.507s
> user    0m0.179s
> sys     0m1.328s
> 
> 
> > dpdk performance is in the tens of
> > millions of packets per system.
> 
> I think that's with a bunch of batching though.
> 
> > It's not just the lack of system calls, of course, the architecture is
> > completely different.
> 
> Absolutely - I'm not saying move all of DPDK into kernel.
> We just need to protect the RX rings so hardware does
> not corrupt kernel memory.
> 
> 
> Thinking about it some more, many devices
> have separate rings for DMA: TX (device reads memory)
> and RX (device writes memory).
> With such devices, a mode where userspace can write TX ring
> but not RX ring might make sense.
> 
> This will mean userspace might read kernel memory
> through the device, but can not corrupt it.
> 
> That's already a big win!
> 
> And RX buffers do not have to be added one at a time.
> If we assume 0.2usec per system call, batching some 100 buffers per
> system call gives you 2 nano seconds overhead.  That seems quite
> reasonable.
> 
Hi,

just to jump in a bit on this.

Batching of 100 packets is a very large batch, and will add to latency. The
standard batch size in DPDK right now is 32, and even that may be too high for
applications in certain domains.

However, even with that 2ns of overhead calculation, I'd make a few additional
points.
* For DPDK, we are reasonably close to being able to do 40GB of IO - both RX 
and TX on a single thread. 10GB of IO doesn't really stress a core any more. For
40GB of small packet traffic, the packet arrival rate is 16.8ns, so even with a
huge batch size of 100 packets, your system call overhead on RX is taking almost
12% of our processing time. For a batch size of 32 this overhead would rise to
over 35% of our packet processing time. For 100G line rate, the packet arrival
rate is just 6.7ns...

* As well as this overhead from the system call itself, you are also omitting
the overhead of scanning the RX descriptors. This in itself is going to use up
a good proportion of the processing time, as well as that we have to spend cycles
copying the descriptors from one ring in memory to another. Given that right now
with the vector ixgbe driver, the cycle cost per packet of RX is just a few dozen
cycles on modern cores, every additional cycle (fraction of a nanosecond) has
an impact.

Regards,
/Bruce