linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] virtio-mmio: add features for virtio-mmio specification version 3

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Message-Id: <56703BDA-B7AE-4656-8061-85FD1A130597@linux.alibaba.com>
Date:   Thu, 26 Dec 2019 21:16:19 +0800
From:   "Liu, Jiang" <gerry@...ux.alibaba.com>
To:     Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>
Cc:     Zha Bin <zhabin@...ux.alibaba.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        mst@...hat.com, slp@...hat.com, virtio-dev@...ts.oasis-open.org,
        jing2.liu@...el.com, chao.p.peng@...el.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] virtio-mmio: add features for virtio-mmio
 specification version 3



> On Dec 26, 2019, at 4:09 PM, Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2019/12/25 下午11:20, Liu, Jiang wrote:
>> 
>>> On Dec 25, 2019, at 6:20 PM, Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 2019/12/25 上午10:50, Zha Bin wrote:
>>>> From: Liu Jiang <gerry@...ux.alibaba.com>
>>>> 
>>>> Userspace VMMs (e.g. Qemu microvm, Firecracker) take advantage of using
>>>> virtio over mmio devices as a lightweight machine model for modern
>>>> cloud. The standard virtio over MMIO transport layer only supports one
>>>> legacy interrupt, which is much heavier than virtio over PCI transport
>>>> layer using MSI. Legacy interrupt has long work path and causes specific
>>>> VMExits in following cases, which would considerably slow down the
>>>> performance:
>>>> 
>>>> 1) read interrupt status register
>>>> 2) update interrupt status register
>>>> 3) write IOAPIC EOI register
>>>> 
>>>> We proposed to update virtio over MMIO to version 3[1] to add the
>>>> following new features and enhance the performance.
>>>> 
>>>> 1) Support Message Signaled Interrupt(MSI), which increases the
>>>>    interrupt performance for virtio multi-queue devices
>>>> 2) Support per-queue doorbell, so the guest kernel may directly write
>>>>    to the doorbells provided by virtio devices.
>>>> 
>>>> The following is the network tcp_rr performance testing report, tested
>>>> with virtio-pci device, vanilla virtio-mmio device and patched
>>>> virtio-mmio device (run test 3 times for each case):
>>>> 
>>>> 	netperf -t TCP_RR -H 192.168.1.36 -l 30 -- -r 32,1024
>>>> 
>>>> 		Virtio-PCI    Virtio-MMIO   Virtio-MMIO(MSI)
>>>> 	trans/s	    9536	6939		9500
>>>> 	trans/s	    9734	7029		9749
>>>> 	trans/s	    9894	7095		9318
>>>> 
>>>> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/12/20/113
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the patch. Two questions after a quick glance:
>>> 
>>> 1) In PCI we choose to support MSI-X instead of MSI for having extra flexibility like alias, independent data and address (e.g for affinity) . Any reason for not start from MSI-X? E.g having MSI-X table and PBA (both of which looks pretty independent).
>> Hi Jason,
>> 	Thanks for reviewing patches on Christmas Day:)
>> 	The PCI MSI-x has several advantages over PCI MSI, mainly
>> 1) support 2048 vectors, much more than 32 vectors supported by MSI.
>> 2) dedicated address/data for each vector,
>> 3) per vector mask/pending bits.
>> The proposed MMIO MSI extension supports both 1) and 2),
> 
> 
> Aha right, I mis-read the patch. But more questions comes:
> 
> 1) The association between vq and MSI-X vector is fixed. This means it can't work for a device that have more than 2047 queues. We probably need something similar to virtio-pci to allow a dynamic association.
We have considered both the PCI MSI-x like dynamic association design and fix mapping design.
The fix mapping design simplifies both the interrupt configuration process and VMM implementations. 
And the virtio mmio transport layer is mainly used by light VMMs to support small scale virtual machines,  2048 vectors should be enough for these usage cases.
So the fix mapping design has been used.

> 2) The mask and unmask control is missed
> 
> 
>>  but the extension doesn’t support 3) because
>> we noticed that the Linux virtio subsystem doesn’t really make use of interrupt masking/unmasking.
> 
> 
> Not directly used but masking/unmasking is widely used in irq subsystem which allows lots of optimizations.
> 
> 
>> 
>> On the other hand, we want to simplify VMM implementations as simple as possible, and mimicking the PCI MSI-x
>> will cause some complexity to VMM implementations.
> 
> 
> I agree to simplify VMM implementation, but it looks to me introducing masking/pending won't cost too much code in the VMM implementation. Just new type of command for VIRTIO_MMIO_MSI_COMMAND.
We want to make VMM implementations as simple as possible:) 
And based on following observations, we have disabled support of mask/unmask,
1) MSI is edge triggering, which means it won’t be shared with other interrupt sources, so masking/unmasking won’t be used for normal interrupt management logic.
2) Linux virtio mmio transport layer doesn’t support  suspend/resume yet, so there’s no need to quiesce the device by masking interrupts.
3) The legacy PCI 2.2 devices doesn’t support irq masking/unmasking, so irq masking/unmasking may be optional operations.
So we skipped support of irq masking/unmasking. We will recheck whether irq masking/unmasking is mandatory for MMIO devices.
On the other hand, we may enhance the spec to define command codes for masking/unmasking, and VMM may optionally support masking/unmasking.

Thanks,
Gerry

> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
>> 
>>> 2) It's better to split notify_multiplexer out of MSI support to ease the reviewers (apply to spec patch as well)
>> Great suggestion, we will try to split the patch.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Gerry
>> 
>>> Thanks