Date:   Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:15:06 -0400
From:   Willem de Bruijn <willemdebruijn.kernel@...il.com>
To:     Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>
Cc:     "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
        Koichiro Den <den@...ipeden.com>,
        virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
        Network Development <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] virtio-net: invoke zerocopy callback on xmit
 path if no tx napi

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 2017年08月31日 22:30, Willem de Bruijn wrote:
>>>
>>> Incomplete results at this stage, but I do see this correlation between
>>> flows. It occurs even while not running out of zerocopy descriptors,
>>> which I cannot yet explain.
>>>
>>> Running two threads in a guest, each with a udp socket, each
>>> sending up to 100 datagrams, or until EAGAIN, every msec.
>>>
>>> Sender A sends 1B datagrams.
>>> Sender B sends VHOST_GOODCOPY_LEN, which is enough
>>> to trigger zcopy_used in vhost net.
>>>
>>> A local receive process on the host receives both flows. To avoid
>>> a deep copy when looping the packet onto the receive path,
>>> changed skb_orphan_frags_rx to always return false (gross hack).
>>>
>>> The flow with the larger packets is redirected through netem on ifb0:
>>>
>>>    modprobe ifb
>>>    ip link set dev ifb0 up
>>>    tc qdisc add dev ifb0 root netem limit $LIMIT rate 1MBit
>>>
>>>    tc qdisc add dev tap0 ingress
>>>    tc filter add dev tap0 parent ffff: protocol ip \
>>>        u32 match ip dport 8000 0xffff \
>>>        action mirred egress redirect dev ifb0
>>>
>>> For 10 second run, packet count with various ifb0 queue lengths $LIMIT:
>>>
>>> no filter
>>>    rx.A: ~840,000
>>>    rx.B: ~840,000
>>>
>>> limit 1
>>>    rx.A: ~500,000
>>>    rx.B: ~3100
>>>    ifb0: 3273 sent, 371141 dropped
>>>
>>> limit 100
>>>    rx.A: ~9000
>>>    rx.B: ~4200
>>>    ifb0: 4630 sent, 1491 dropped
>>>
>>> limit 1000
>>>    rx.A: ~6800
>>>    rx.B: ~4200
>>>    ifb0: 4651 sent, 0 dropped
>>>
>>> Sender B is always correctly rate limited to 1 MBps or less. With a
>>> short queue, it ends up dropping a lot and sending even less.
>>>
>>> When a queue builds up for sender B, sender A throughput is strongly
>>> correlated with queue length. With queue length 1, it can send almost
>>> at unthrottled speed. But even at limit 100 its throughput is on the
>>> same order as sender B.
>>>
>>> What is surprising to me is that this happens even though the number
>>> of ubuf_info in use at limit 100 is around 100 at all times. In other
>>> words,
>>> it does not exhaust the pool.
>>>
>>> When forcing zcopy_used to be false for all packets, this effect of
>>> sender A throughput being correlated with sender B does not happen.
>>>
>>> no filter
>>>    rx.A: ~850,000
>>>    rx.B: ~850,000
>>>
>>> limit 100
>>>    rx.A: ~850,000
>>>    rx.B: ~4200
>>>    ifb0: 4518 sent, 876182 dropped
>>>
>>> Also relevant is that with zerocopy, the sender processes back off
>>> and report the same count as the receiver. Without zerocopy,
>>> both senders send at full speed, even if only 4200 packets from flow
>>> B arrive at the receiver.
>>>
>>> This is with the default virtio_net driver, so without napi-tx.
>>>
>>> It appears that the zerocopy notifications are pausing the guest.
>>> Will look at that now.
>>
>> It was indeed as simple as that. With 256 descriptors, queuing even
>> a hundred or so packets causes the guest to stall the device as soon
>> as the qdisc is installed.
>>
>> Adding this check
>>
>> +                       in_use = nvq->upend_idx - nvq->done_idx;
>> +                       if (nvq->upend_idx < nvq->done_idx)
>> +                               in_use += UIO_MAXIOV;
>> +
>> +                       if (in_use > (vq->num >> 2))
>> +                               zcopy_used = false;
>>
>> Has the desired behavior of reverting zerocopy requests to copying.
>>
>> Without this change, the result is, as previously reported, throughput
>> dropping to hundreds of packets per second on both flows.
>>
>> With the change, pps as observed for a few seconds at handle_tx is
>>
>> zerocopy=165 copy=168435
>> zerocopy=0 copy=168500
>> zerocopy=65 copy=168535
>>
>> Both flows continue to send at more or less normal rate, with only
>> sender B observing massive drops at the netem.
>>
>> With the queue removed the rate reverts to
>>
>> zerocopy=58878 copy=110239
>> zerocopy=58833 copy=110207
>>
>> This is not a 50/50 split, which impliesTw that some packets from the
>> large
>> packet flow are still converted to copying. Without the change the rate
>> without queue was 80k zerocopy vs 80k copy, so this choice of
>> (vq->num >> 2) appears too conservative.
>>
>> However, testing with (vq->num >> 1) was not as effective at mitigating
>> stalls. I did not save that data, unfortunately. Can run more tests on
>> fine
>> tuning this variable, if the idea sounds good.
>
>
> Looks like there're still two cases were left:

To be clear, this patch is not intended to fix all issues. It is a small
improvement to avoid HoL blocking due to queued zerocopy skbs.

The trade-off is that reverting to copying in these cases increases
cycle cost. I think that that is a trade-off worth making compared to
the alternative drop in throughput. It probably would be good to be
able to measure this without kernel instrumentation: export
counters similar to net->tx_zcopy_err and net->tx_packets (though
without reset to zero, as in vhost_net_tx_packet).

> 1) sndbuf is not INT_MAX

You mean the case where the device stalls, later zerocopy notifications
are queued, but these are never cleaned in free_old_xmit_skbs,
because it requires a start_xmit and by now the (only) socket is out of
descriptors?

A watchdog would help somewhat. With tx-napi, this case cannot occur,
either, as free_old_xmit_skbs no longer depends on a call to start_xmit.

> 2) tx napi is used for virtio-net

I am not aware of any issue specific to the use of tx-napi?

> 1) could be a corner case, and for 2) what your suggest here may not solve
> the issue since it still do in order completion.

Somewhat tangential, but it might also help to break the in-order
completion processing in vhost_zerocopy_signal_used. Complete
all descriptors between done_idx and upend_idx. done_idx should
then only be forward to the oldest still not-completed descriptor.

In the test I ran, where the oldest descriptors are held in a queue and
all newer ones are tail-dropped, this would avoid blocking a full ring
of completions, when only a small number (or 1) is actually delayed.

Dynamic switching between copy and zerocopy using zcopy_used
already returns completions out-of-order, so this is not a huge leap.

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