[dpdk-dev] KNI performance

[Marc Sune]

On 05/06/15 17:06, Jay Rolette wrote:
> The past few days I've been trying to chase down why operations over KNI
> are so bloody slow. To give you an idea how bad it is, we did a simple test
> over an NFS mount:
>
> # Mount over a non-KNI interface (eth0 on vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 LTS)
> $ time $(ls -last -R /mnt/sfs2008 > /dev/null)
> real    11m58.224s
> user    0m10.758s
> sys     0m25.050s
>
> # Reboot to make sure NFS cache is cleared and mount over a KNI interface
> $ time $(ls -last -R /mnt/sfs2008 > /dev/null)
> real    87m36.295s
> user    0m14.552s
> sys     0m25.949s
>
> Packet captures showed a pretty consistent ~4ms delay. Get a READDIRPLUS
> reply from NFS server and the TCP stack on the DPDK/KNI system took about
> 4ms to ACK the reply. It isn't just on ACK packets either. If there was no
> ACK required, there would be a 4ms delay before the next call was sent
> (ACCESS, LOOKUP, another READDIR, etc.).
>
> This is running on top of a real DPDK app, so there are various queues and
> ring-buffers in the path between KNI and the wire, so I started there. Long
> story short, worst case, those could only inject ~120us of latency into the
> path.
>
> Next stop was KNI itself. Ignoring a few minor optos I found, nothing in
> the code looked like it could account for 4ms of latency. That wasn't quite
> right though...
>
> Here's the code for the processing loop in kni_thread_single():
>
>          while (!kthread_should_stop()) {
>                  down_read(&kni_list_lock);
>                  for (j = 0; j < KNI_RX_LOOP_NUM; j++) {
>                          list_for_each_entry(dev, &kni_list_head, list) {
> #ifdef RTE_KNI_VHOST
>                                  kni_chk_vhost_rx(dev);
> #else
>                                  kni_net_rx(dev);
> #endif
>                                  kni_net_poll_resp(dev);
>                          }
>                  }
>                  up_read(&kni_list_lock);
>                  /* reschedule out for a while */
>                  schedule_timeout_interruptible(usecs_to_jiffies( \
>                                  KNI_KTHREAD_RESCHEDULE_INTERVAL));
>
> Turns out the 4ms delay is due to the schedule_timeout() call. The code
> specifies a 5us sleep, but the call only guarantees a sleep of *at least*
> the time specified.
>
> The resolution of the sleep is controlled by the timer interrupt rate. If
> you are using a kernel from one of the usual Linux distros, HZ = 250 on
> x86. That works out nicely to a 4ms period. The KNI kernel thread was going
> to sleep and frequently not getting woken up for nearly 4ms.
>
> We rebuilt the kernel with HZ = 1000 and things improved considerably:
>
> # Mount over a KNI interface, HZ=1000
> $ time $(ls -last -R /mnt/sfs2008 > /dev/null)
>
> real    21m8.478s
> user    0m13.824s
> sys     0m18.113s
>
> Still not where I'd like to get it, but much, much better.
>
> Hopefully my pain is your gain and this helps other KNI users.

Jay,

If you set CONFIG_RTE_KNI_PREEMPT_DEFAULT to 'n' you should see a 
reduced latency and delay since there is no preemption (though 
sacrifices 1 CPU for the kni kmod):

http://patchwork.dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/3304/

However, KNI is still pretty slow. Even considering that there will 
always be at least 1 copy involved, I still think is too slow. I didn't 
had time to look closer yet.

Marc



>
> Jay