Re: VT is comically slow

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:16:18 -0800, alex wrote:

> We (Virtual Iron) are in a process of developing accelerated drivers for
> the HVM guests.  Our goal for this effort is to get as close to native
> performance as possible and to make paravirtualization of guests
> unnecessary.  The drivers currently support most flavors of RHEL, SLES and
> Windows.  The early performance numbers are encouraging.  Some numbers are
> many times faster than QEMU emulation and are close to native performance
> numbers (and we are just beginning to tune the performance).

I don't think paravirtual drivers are necessary for good performance. 
There are a number of things about QEMU's device emulation that are less
than ideal.

Namely, QEMU's disk emulation is IDE w/DMA.  Apparently, DMA is busted
right now but even if it worked, IDE only allows one outstanding request
at a time (which doesn't let the host scheduler do it's thing properly). 
Emulating either SCSI (which is in QEMU CVS) or SATA would allow multiple
outstanding requests which would be a big benefit.

Also, and I suspect this has more to do with your performance numbers,
QEMU currently does disk IO via read()/write() syscalls on an fd that's
open()'d without O_DIRECT.  This means everything's going through the page
cache.

I suspect that SCSI + linux-aio would result in close to native
performance.  Since SCSI is already in QEMU CVS, it's not that far off.

I think that the same applies to network IO but I'm not qualified to
comment on what things are important there.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Just to give people a flavor of the performance that we are getting,
> here are some preliminary results on Intel Woodcrest (51xx series), with
> a Gigabit network, with SAN storage and all of the VMs were 1 CPU. These
> numbers are very early, disks numbers are very good and we are still
> tuning the network numbers.
> 
> Bonnie-SAN - bigger is better        RHEL-4.0 (32-bit)   VI-accel
> RHEL-4.0(32-bit) Write, KB/sec                          52,106
>     49,500 Read, KB/sec                           59,392
> 57,186
> 
> netperf - bigger is better           RHEL-4.0 (32-bit)   VI-accel
> RHEL-4.0(32-bit) tcp req/resp (t/sec)	               6,831
>  5,648
> 
> SPECjbb2000 - bigger is better       RHEL-4.0 (32-bit)   VI-accel
> RHEL-4.0(32-bit) JRockit JVM thruput                    43,061
>     40,364
> 
> This code is modeled on Xen backend/frontend architecture concepts and
> will be GPLed.
>  
> -Alex V.
> 
> Alex Vasilevsky
> Chief Technology Officer, Founder
> Virtual Iron Software, Inc