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

[Alexander Duyck]

On 10/01/2015 02:42 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 12:22:46PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
>> even when they are some users
>> prefer to avoid the performance penalty.
> I don't think there's a measureable penalty from passing through the
> IOMMU, as long as mappings are mostly static (i.e. iommu=pt).  I sure
> never saw any numbers that show such.

It depends on the IOMMU.  I believe Intel had a performance penalty on 
all CPUs prior to Ivy Bridge.  Since then things have improved to where 
they are comparable to bare metal.

The graph on page 5 of 
https://networkbuilders.intel.com/docs/Network_Builders_RA_vBRAS_Final.pdf 
shows the penalty clear as day.  Pretty much anything before Ivy Bridge 
w/ small packets is slowed to a crawl with an IOMMU enabled.

- Alex