[dpdk-dev] overcommitting CPUs

[Alex Markuze]

IMHO adding "Interrupt Mode" to dpdk is important as this can open
DPDK to a larger public of consumers, I can easily imagine someone
trying to find user space networking  solution (And deciding against
verbs - RDMA) for the obvious reasons and not needing deterministic
latency.

A few thoughts:

Deterministic Latency: Its a fiction in a sence that  this something
you will be able to see only in a small controlled environment. As
network latencies in Data Centres(DC) are dominated by switch queuing
(One good reference is http://fastpass.mit.edu that Vincent shared a
few days back).

Virtual environments: In virtual environments this is especially
interesting as the NIC driver(Hypervisor) is working in IRQ mode which
unless the Interrupts are pinned to different cpus then the VM will
have a disruptive effect on the VM's performance. Moving to interrupt
mode mode in paravirtualised environments makes sense as in any
environment that is not carefully crafted you should not expect any
deterministic guaranties and would opt for a simpler programming model
- like interrupt mode.

NAPI: With 10G NICs Most CPUs poll rate is faster then the NIC message
rate resulting in 1:1 napi_poll callback to IRQ ratio this is true
even with small packets. In some cases where the CPU is working slower
- for example when intel_iommu=on,strict is set , you can actually see
a performance inversion where the "slower" CPU can reach higher B/W
because the slowdown makes NAPI work with the kernel effectively
moving to polling mode.

I think that a smarter DPDK-NAPI is important, but it is a next step
IFF the interrupt mode is adopted.

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:48 AM, Patel, Rashmin N
<rashmin.n.patel at intel.com> wrote:
> You're right and I've felt the same harder part of determinism with other hypervisors' soft switch solutions as well. I think it's worth thinking about.
>
> Thanks,
> Rashmin
>
> On Aug 26, 2014 9:15 PM, Stephen Hemminger <stephen at networkplumber.org> wrote:
> The way to handle switch between out of poll mode is to use IRQ coalescing
> parameters.
> You want to hold off IRQ until there are a couple packets or a short delay.
> Going out of poll mode
> is harder to determine.
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Zhou, Danny <danny.zhou at intel.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Hemminger
>> > Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 12:39 AM
>> > To: Michael Marchetti
>> > Cc: dev at dpdk.org
>> > Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] overcommitting CPUs
>> >
>> > On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 16:27:14 +0000
>> > "Michael  Marchetti" <mmarchetti at sandvine.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > Hi, has there been any consideration to introduce a non-spinning
>> network driver (interrupt based), for the purpose of overcommitting
>> > CPUs in a virtualized environment?  This would obviously have reduced
>> high-end performance but would allow for increased guest
>> > density (sharing of physical CPUs) on a host.
>> > >
>> > > I am interested in adding support for this kind of operation, is there
>> any interest in the community?
>> > >
>> > > Thanks,
>> > >
>> > > Mike.
>> >
>> > Better to implement a NAPI like algorithm that adapts from poll to
>> interrupt.
>>
>> Agreed, but DPDK is currently pure poll-mode based, so unlike the NAPI'
>> simple algorithm, the new heuristic algorithm should not switch from
>> poll-mode to interrupt-mode immediately once there is no packet in the
>> recent poll. Otherwise, mode switching will be too frequent which brings
>> serious negative performance impact to DPDK.
>>