Date:	Fri, 17 Jan 2014 14:36:21 +0800
From:	Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>
To:	Tom Herbert <therbert@...gle.com>
CC:	Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@...hat.com>,
	Zhi Yong Wu <zwu.kernel@...il.com>,
	Linux Netdev List <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
	Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
	Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>
Subject: Re: Fwd: [RFC PATCH net-next 0/3] virtio_net: add aRFS support

On 01/17/2014 01:08 PM, Tom Herbert wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 7:26 PM, Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com> wrote:
>> On 01/17/2014 01:12 AM, Tom Herbert wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@...hat.com> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 04:34:10PM +0800, Zhi Yong Wu wrote:
>>>>> CC: stefanha, MST, Rusty Russel
>>>>>
>>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>>> From: Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>
>>>>> Date: Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 12:23 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH net-next 0/3] virtio_net: add aRFS support
>>>>> To: Zhi Yong Wu <zwu.kernel@...il.com>
>>>>> Cc: netdev@...r.kernel.org, therbert@...gle.com, edumazet@...gle.com,
>>>>> davem@...emloft.net, Zhi Yong Wu <wuzhy@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 01/15/2014 10:20 PM, Zhi Yong Wu wrote:
>>>>>> From: Zhi Yong Wu<wuzhy@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> HI, folks
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The patchset is trying to integrate aRFS support to virtio_net. In this case,
>>>>>> aRFS will be used to select the RX queue. To make sure that it's going ahead
>>>>>> in the correct direction, although it is still one RFC and isn't tested, it's
>>>>>> post out ASAP. Any comment are appreciated, thanks.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If anyone is interested in playing with it, you can get this patchset from my
>>>>>> dev git on github:
>>>>>>    git://github.com/wuzhy/kernel.git virtnet_rfs
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Zhi Yong Wu (3):
>>>>>>    virtio_pci: Introduce one new config api vp_get_vq_irq()
>>>>>>    virtio_net: Introduce one dummy function virtnet_filter_rfs()
>>>>>>    virtio-net: Add accelerated RFS support
>>>>>>
>>>>>>   drivers/net/virtio_net.c      |   67 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
>>>>>>   drivers/virtio/virtio_pci.c   |   11 +++++++
>>>>>>   include/linux/virtio_config.h |   12 +++++++
>>>>>>   3 files changed, 89 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
>>>>>>
>>>>> Please run get_maintainter.pl before sending the patch. You'd better
>>>>> at least cc virtio maintainer/list for this.
>>>>>
>>>>> The core aRFS method is a noop in this RFC which make this series no
>>>>> much sense to discuss. You should at least mention the big picture
>>>>> here in the cover letter. I suggest you should post a RFC which can
>>>>> run and has expected result or you can just raise a thread for the
>>>>> design discussion.
>>>>>
>>>>> And this method has been discussed before, you can search "[net-next
>>>>> RFC PATCH 5/5] virtio-net: flow director support" in netdev archive
>>>>> for a very old prototype implemented by me. It can work and looks like
>>>>> most of this RFC have already done there.
>>>>>
>>>>> A basic question is whether or not we need this, not all the mq cards
>>>>> use aRFS (see ixgbe ATR). And whether or not it can bring extra
>>>>> overheads? For virtio, we want to reduce the vmexits as much as
>>>>> possible but this aRFS seems introduce a lot of more of this. Making a
>>>>> complex interfaces just for an virtual device may not be good, simple
>>>>> method may works for most of the cases.
>>>>>
>>>>> We really should consider to offload this to real nic. VMDq and L2
>>>>> forwarding offload may help in this case.
>>> Adding flow director support would be a good step, Zhi's patches for
>>> support in tun have been merged, so support in virtio-net would be a
>>> good follow on. But, flow-director does have some limitations and
>>> performance issues of it's own (forced pairing between TX and RX
>>> queues, lookup on every TX packet).
>> True. But the pairing was designed to work without guest involving since
>> we really want to reduce the vmexits from guest. And lookup on every TX
>> packets could be released to every N packets. But I agree exposing the
>> API to guest may bring lots of flexibility.
>>> In the case of virtualization,
>>> aRFS, RSS, ntuple filtering, LRO, etc. can be implemented as software
>>> emulations and so far seems to be wins in most cases. Extending these
>>> down into the stack so that they can leverage HW mechanisms is a good
>>> goal for best performance. It's probably generally true that most of
>>> the offloads commonly available for NICs we'll want in virtualization
>>> path. Of course, we need to deomonstrate that they provide real
>>> performance benefit in this use case.
>> Yes, we need a prototype to see how much it can help.
>>> I believe tying in aRFS (or flow director) into a real aRFS is just a
>>> matter of programming the RFS table properly. This is not the complex
>>> side of the interface, I believe this already works with the tun
>>> patches.
>> Right, what we may needs is
>>
>> - exposing new tun ioctls for qemu adding or removing a flow
>> - new virtqueue command for guest driver to adding or removing a flow
>> (btw, current control virtqueue is really slow, we may need to improve it).
>> - an agreement of host and guest to use the same hash method, or just
>> compute software hash in host and pass it to guest (which needs extra
>> API to do)
> The model to get RX hash from a device is well known, the guest can
> use that to reflect information about a flow back to the host, and for
> performance we might piggyback RX queue selection on the TX
> descriptors of a flow. Probably some limitations with real HW, but I
> assume would have less issues in SW.

It may work but may need extending the current virtio-net TX descriptor
or extra API such as vnet header.
>
> IMO, if we have a flow state on the host we should *never* need to
> perform any hash computation on TX (a host is not a switch :-) ), we
> may want to have some mirrored flow state in the kernel for these
> flows which are indexed by the hash provided in TX.

The problem is host may have several different type cards, so the it was
not guaranteed that they can provide the same rxhash.
>
>> - change guest driver to use aRFS
>>
>> Some of the above has been implemented in my old RFC.
> Looks pretty similar to Zhi's tun work. Are you planning to refresh
> those patches?

I have the plan. But there's another concern:

During my testing ( and also tested by some IBM engineers in the past),
we find it's better for a single vhost thread to handle both rx and tx
for a single flow. Using two different vhost threads to handle a flow
may damage the performance in most of the cases. That's why we enforce
the pairing of rx and tx in tun currently. But looks like aRFS can't
guarantee this. If we want to enforce this paring through XPS/irq
affinity, there's no need for aRFS.
>
>>>> Zhi Yong and I had an IRC chat.  I wanted to post my questions on the
>>>> list - it's still the same concern I had in the old email thread that
>>>> Jason mentioned.
>>>>
>>>> In order for virtio-net aRFS to make sense there needs to be an overall
>>>> plan for pushing flow mapping information down to the physical NIC.
>>>> That's the only way to actually achieve the benefit of steering:
>>>> processing the packet on the CPU where the application is running.
>>>>
>>> I don't think this is necessarily true. Per flow steering amongst
>>> virtual queues should be beneficial in itself. virtio-net can leverage
>>> RFS or aRFS where it's available.
>>>
>>>> If it's not possible or too hard to implement aRFS down the entire
>>>> stack, we won't be able to process the packet on the right CPU.
>>>> Then we might as well not bother with aRFS and just distribute uniformly
>>>> across the rx virtqueues.
>>>>
>>>> Please post an outline of how rx packets will be steered up the stack so
>>>> we can discuss whether aRFS can bring any benefit.
>>>>
>>> 1. The aRFS interface for the guest to specify which virtual queue to
>>> receive a packet on is fairly straight forward.
>>> 2. To hook into RFS, we need to match the virtual queue to the real
>>> CPU it will processed on, and then program the RFS table for that flow
>>> and CPU.
>>> 3. NIC aRFS keys off the RFS tables so it can program the HW with the
>>> correct queue for the CPU.
>>>
>>>> Stefan
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