[dpdk-dev] L3 Forwarding performance of DPDK on virtio

[dpdk-dev] L3 Forwarding performance of DPDK on virtio

[Clarylin L]

I am running dpdk within a virtual guest as a L3 forwarder.


The VM has two ports connecting to two linux bridges (in turn connecting
two physical ports). DPDK is used to forward between these two ports (one
port connected to traffic generator and the other connected to sink). I
used iperf to test the throughput.


If the VM/DPDK is running on passthrough, it can achieve around 10G
end-to-end (from traffic generator to sink) throughput. However if the
VM/DPDK is running on virtio (virtio-net-pmd), it achieves just 150M
throughput, which is a huge degrade.


On the virtio, I also measured the throughput between the traffic generator
and its connected port on VM, as well as throughput between the sink and
it's VM port. Both legs show around 7.5G throughput. So I guess forwarding
within the VM (from one port to the other) would be a big killer of the
performance.


Any suggestion on how I can root cause the poor performance issue, or any
idea on performance tuning techniques for virtio? thanks a lot!

Re: [dpdk-dev] L3 Forwarding performance of DPDK on virtio

[Tan, Jianfeng]

Hello!

On 1/21/2016 7:51 AM, Clarylin L wrote:
> I am running dpdk within a virtual guest as a L3 forwarder.
>
>
> The VM has two ports connecting to two linux bridges (in turn connecting
> two physical ports). DPDK is used to forward between these two ports (one
> port connected to traffic generator and the other connected to sink). I
> used iperf to test the throughput.
>
>
> If the VM/DPDK is running on passthrough, it can achieve around 10G
> end-to-end (from traffic generator to sink) throughput. However if the
> VM/DPDK is running on virtio (virtio-net-pmd), it achieves just 150M
> throughput, which is a huge degrade.
>
>
> On the virtio, I also measured the throughput between the traffic generator
> and its connected port on VM, as well as throughput between the sink and
> it's VM port. Both legs show around 7.5G throughput. So I guess forwarding
> within the VM (from one port to the other) would be a big killer of the
> performance.
>
>
> Any suggestion on how I can root cause the poor performance issue, or any
> idea on performance tuning techniques for virtio? thanks a lot!

The L3 forwarder, you mentioned, is the l3fwd example in DPDK? If so, I 
doubt it can work well with virtio, see another thread "Add API to get 
packet type info".

Thanks,
Jianfeng

Re: [dpdk-dev] L3 Forwarding performance of DPDK on virtio

[Clarylin L]

Sorry. It's L2 forwarding.

I used testpmd with forwarding mode, like
testpmd --pci-blacklist 0000:00:05.0 -c f -n 4  -- --portmask 3 -i
--total-num-mbufs=20000 --nb-cores=3 --mbcache=512 --burst=512
--forward-mode=mac --eth-peer=0,90:e2:ba:9f:95:94
--eth-peer=1,90:e2:ba:9f:95:95

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Tan, Jianfeng <jianfeng.tan@intel.com>
wrote:

>
> Hello!
>
>
> On 1/21/2016 7:51 AM, Clarylin L wrote:
>
>> I am running dpdk within a virtual guest as a L3 forwarder.
>>
>>
>> The VM has two ports connecting to two linux bridges (in turn connecting
>> two physical ports). DPDK is used to forward between these two ports (one
>> port connected to traffic generator and the other connected to sink). I
>> used iperf to test the throughput.
>>
>>
>> If the VM/DPDK is running on passthrough, it can achieve around 10G
>> end-to-end (from traffic generator to sink) throughput. However if the
>> VM/DPDK is running on virtio (virtio-net-pmd), it achieves just 150M
>> throughput, which is a huge degrade.
>>
>>
>> On the virtio, I also measured the throughput between the traffic
>> generator
>> and its connected port on VM, as well as throughput between the sink and
>> it's VM port. Both legs show around 7.5G throughput. So I guess forwarding
>> within the VM (from one port to the other) would be a big killer of the
>> performance.
>>
>>
>> Any suggestion on how I can root cause the poor performance issue, or any
>> idea on performance tuning techniques for virtio? thanks a lot!
>>
>
> The L3 forwarder, you mentioned, is the l3fwd example in DPDK? If so, I
> doubt it can work well with virtio, see another thread "Add API to get
> packet type info".
>
> Thanks,
> Jianfeng
>