Re: XDP Performance Regression in recent kernel versions

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer <hawk@kernel.org>]

On 18/06/2024 17.28, Sebastiano Miano wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have been conducting some basic experiments with XDP and have
> observed a significant performance regression in recent kernel
> versions compared to v5.15.
> 
> My setup is the following:
> - Hardware: Two machines connected back-to-back with 100G Mellanox
> ConnectX-6 Dx.
> - DUT: 2x16 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4314 CPU @ 2.40GHz.
> - Software: xdp-bench program from [1] running on the DUT in both DROP
> and TX modes.
> - Traffic generator: Pktgen-DPDK sending traffic with a single 64B UDP
> flow at ~130Mpps.
> - Tests: Single core, HT disabled
> 
> Results:
> 
> Kernel version |-------| XDP_DROP |--------|   XDP_TX  |
> 5.15                      30Mpps               16.1Mpps
> 6.2                       21.3Mpps             14.1Mpps
> 6.5                       19.9Mpps              8.6Mpps
> bpf-next (6.10-rc2)       22.1Mpps              9.2Mpps
> 

Around when I left Red Hat there were a project with [LNST] that used
xdp-bench for tracking and finding regressions like this.

Perhaps Toke can enlighten us, if that project have caught similar 
regressions?

[LNST] https://github.com/LNST-project/lnst


> I repeated the experiments multiple times and consistently obtained
> similar results.
> Are you aware of any performance regressions in recent kernel versions
> that could explain these results?
> 
> [1] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-tools


--Jesper