Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC 0/3] aio: experimental virtio-blk polling mode

[Fam Zheng <famz@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 11/14 17:06, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 04:29:49PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > On 14/11/2016 16:26, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > > On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 01:59:25PM -0600, Karl Rister wrote:
> > >> QEMU_AIO_POLL_MAX_NS      IOPs
> > >>                unset    31,383
> > >>                    1    46,860
> > >>                    2    46,440
> > >>                    4    35,246
> > >>                    8    34,973
> > >>                   16    46,794
> > >>                   32    46,729
> > >>                   64    35,520
> > >>                  128    45,902
> > > 
> > > The environment variable is in nanoseconds.  The range of values you
> > > tried are very small (all <1 usec).  It would be interesting to try
> > > larger values in the ballpark of the latencies you have traced.  For
> > > example 2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, and 32000 ns.
> > > 
> > > Very interesting that QEMU_AIO_POLL_MAX_NS=1 performs so well without
> > > much CPU overhead.
> > 
> > That basically means "avoid a syscall if you already know there's
> > something to do", so in retrospect it's not that surprising.  Still
> > interesting though, and it means that the feature is useful even if you
> > don't have CPU to waste.
> 
> Can you spell out which syscall you mean?  Reading the ioeventfd?
> 
> The benchmark uses virtio-blk dataplane and iodepth=1 so there shouldn't
> be much IOThread event loop activity besides the single I/O request.
> 
> The reason this puzzles me is that I wouldn't expect poll to succeed
> with QEMU_AIO_POLL_MAX_NS and iodepth=1.

I see the guest shouldn't send more requests, but isn't it possible for
the linux-aio poll to succeed?

Fam

> 
> Thanks,
> Stefan