[dpdk-dev] [PATCH 03/21] vhost: protect virtio_net device struct

Maxime Coquelin maxime.coquelin at redhat.com
Wed Sep 6 09:15:47 CEST 2017


Hi Tiwei,

On 09/06/2017 03:15 AM, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 01:00:42PM +0200, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
>> On 09/05/2017 12:07 PM, Tiwei Bie wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 11:24:14AM +0200, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
>>>> On 09/05/2017 06:45 AM, Tiwei Bie wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:50:05AM +0200, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
>>>>>> virtio_net device might be accessed while being reallocated
>>>>>> in case of NUMA awareness. This case might be theoretical,
>>>>>> but it will be needed anyway to protect vrings pages against
>>>>>> invalidation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The virtio_net devs are now protected with a readers/writers
>>>>>> lock, so that before reallocating the device, it is ensured
>>>>>> that it is not being referenced by the processing threads.
>>>>>>
>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> +struct virtio_net *
>>>>>> +get_device(int vid)
>>>>>> +{
>>>>>> +	struct virtio_net *dev;
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +	rte_rwlock_read_lock(&vhost_devices[vid].lock);
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +	dev = __get_device(vid);
>>>>>> +	if (unlikely(!dev))
>>>>>> +		rte_rwlock_read_unlock(&vhost_devices[vid].lock);
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +	return dev;
>>>>>> +}
>>>>>> +
>>>>>> +void
>>>>>> +put_device(int vid)
>>>>>> +{
>>>>>> +	rte_rwlock_read_unlock(&vhost_devices[vid].lock);
>>>>>> +}
>>>>>> +
>>>>>
>>>>> This patch introduced a per-device rwlock which needs to be acquired
>>>>> unconditionally in the data path. So for each vhost device, the IO
>>>>> threads of different queues will need to acquire/release this lock
>>>>> during each enqueue and dequeue operation, which will cause cache
>>>>> contention when multiple queues are enabled and handled by different
>>>>> cores. With this patch alone, I saw ~7% performance drop when enabling
>>>>> 6 queues to do 64bytes iofwd loopback test. Is there any way to avoid
>>>>> introducing this lock to the data path?
>>>>
>>>> First, I'd like to thank you for running the MQ test.
>>>> I agree it may have a performance impact in this case.
>>>>
>>>> This lock has currently two purposes:
>>>> 1. Prevent referencing freed virtio_dev struct in case of numa_realloc.
>>>> 2. Protect vring pages against invalidation.
>>>>
>>>> For 2., it can be fixed by using the per-vq IOTLB lock (it was not the
>>>> case in my early prototypes that had per device IOTLB cache).
>>>>
>>>> For 1., this is an existing problem, so we might consider it is
>>>> acceptable to keep current state. Maybe it could be improved by only
>>>> reallocating in case VQ0 is not on the right NUMA node, the other VQs
>>>> not being initialized at this point.
>>>>
>>>> If we do this we might be able to get rid of this lock, I need some more
>>>> time though to ensure I'm not missing something.
>>>>
>>>> What do you think?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Cool. So it's possible that the lock in the data path will be
>>> acquired only when the IOMMU feature is enabled. It will be
>>> great!
>>>
>>> Besides, I just did a very simple MQ test to verify my thoughts.
>>> Lei (CC'ed in this mail) may do a thorough performance test for
>>> this patch set to evaluate the performance impacts.
>>
>> I'll try to post v2 this week including the proposed change.
>> Maybe it'll be better Lei waits for the v2.
>>
> 
> Cool. Sure. Thank you! :)

I have done the changes, you can find the v2 on my gitlab repo:
https://gitlab.com/mcoquelin/dpdk-next-virtio/commits/vhost_iotlb_v2

I'm testing it right now, but if you'd like to run some early benchmark
before I post the series, there it is!

Thanks,
Maxime
> Best regards,
> Tiwei Bie
> 


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