From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eelco Chaudron Subject: Re: [PATCH] app/testpmd: adds mlockall() to fix pages Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:22:38 +0200 Message-ID: <2ff0680b-b73f-fd1f-9f41-caa38a13bcde@redhat.com> References: <22990026376b08418cb0eb6f028840c03e89f47f.1505221429.git.echaudro@redhat.com> <4147502.SWF1kaKTU5@xps> Reply-To: echaudro@redhat.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: dev@dpdk.org, jingjing.wu@intel.com To: Thomas Monjalon Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com (mx1.redhat.com [209.132.183.28]) by dpdk.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 475E37D4E for ; Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:22:31 +0200 (CEST) In-Reply-To: <4147502.SWF1kaKTU5@xps> Content-Language: en-US List-Id: DPDK patches and discussions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: dev-bounces@dpdk.org Sender: "dev" On 13/09/17 11:39, Thomas Monjalon wrote: > 12/09/2017 15:08, Eelco Chaudron: >> Call the mlockall() function, to attempt to lock all of its process >> memory into physical RAM, and preventing the kernel from paging any >> of its memory to disk. >> >> When using testpmd for performance testing, depending on the code path >> taken, we see a couple of page faults in a row. These faults effect >> the overall drop-rate of testpmd. On Linux the mlockall() call will >> prefault all the pages of testpmd (and the DPDK libraries if linked >> dynamically), even without LD_BIND_NOW. > Does it work on FreeBSD? I do not have a FreeBSD setup, but from the documentation I've read the call is supported by FreeBSD. If some one has a working setup, please give this patch a quick try. > Is there any drawback? > Do we need to add an option for it? The only drawback I can think of is that with this change memory phyiscal memory is consumed as pages are pre-loaded. For testpmd (just loaded not doing anything) this is 2MB vs 35MB of memory used. I do not think this yields an extra option.