[PATCH net-next v4 00/27] io_uring zerocopy send

Pavel Begunkov
2022-07-07T11:51:57Z

NOTE: Not be picked directly. After getting necessary acks, I'll be working
out merging with Jakub and Jens.

The patchset implements io_uring zerocopy send. It works with both registered
and normal buffers, mixing is allowed but not recommended. Apart from usual
request completions, just as with MSG_ZEROCOPY, io_uring separately notifies
the userspace when buffers are freed and can be reused (see API design below),
which is delivered into io_uring's Completion Queue. Those "buffer-free"
notifications are not necessarily per request, but the userspace has control
over it and should explicitly attaching a number of requests to a single
notification. The series also adds some internal optimisations when used with
registered buffers like removing page referencing.

From the kernel networking perspective there are two main changes. The first
one is passing ubuf_info into the network layer from io_uring (inside of an
in kernel struct msghdr). This allows extra optimisations, e.g. ubuf_info
caching on the io_uring side, but also helps to avoid cross-referencing
and synchronisation problems. The second part is an optional optimisation
removing page referencing for requests with registered buffers.

Benchmarking with an optimised version of the selftest (see [1]), which sends
a bunch of requests, waits for completions and repeats. "+ flush" column posts
one additional "buffer-free" notification per request, and just "zc" doesn't
post buffer notifications at all.

NIC (requests / second):
IO size | non-zc | zc | zc + flush
4000 | 495134 | 606420 (+22%) | 558971 (+12%)
1500 | 551808 | 577116 (+4.5%) | 565803 (+2.5%)
1000 | 584677 | 592088 (+1.2%) | 560885 (-4%)
600 | 596292 | 598550 (+0.4%) | 555366 (-6.7%)

dummy (requests / second):
IO size | non-zc | zc | zc + flush
8000 | 1299916 | 2396600 (+84%) | 2224219 (+71%)
4000 | 1869230 | 2344146 (+25%) | 2170069 (+16%)
1200 | 2071617 | 2361960 (+14%) | 2203052 (+6%)
600 | 2106794 | 2381527 (+13%) | 2195295 (+4%)

Previously it also brought a massive performance speedup compared to the
msg_zerocopy tool (see [3]), which is probably not super interesting.

There is an additional bunch of refcounting optimisations that was omitted from
the series for simplicity and as they don't change the picture drastically,
they will be sent as follow up, as well as flushing optimisations closing the
performance gap b/w two last columns.

Note: the series is based on net-next + for-5.20/io_uring, but as vanilla
net-next fails for me the repo (see [2]) is on top of for-5.20/io_uring.

Links:

liburing (benchmark + tests):
[1] https://github.com/isilence/liburing/tree/zc_v4

kernel repo:
[2] https://github.com/isilence/linux/tree/zc_v4

RFC v1:
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/io-uring/cover.1638282789.git.asml.silence@gmail.com/

RFC v2:
https://lore.kernel.org/io-uring/cover.1640029579.git.asml.silence@gmail.com/

Net patches based
git@github.com:isilence/linux.git zc_v4-net-base

API design overview:

The series introduces an io_uring concept of notifactors. From the userspace
perspective it's an entity to which it can bind one or more requests and then
requesting to flush it. Flushing a notifier makes it impossible to attach new
requests to it, and instructs the notifier to post a completion once all
requests attached to it are completed and the kernel doesn't need the buffers
anymore.

Notifications are stored in notification slots, which should be registered as
an array in io_uring. Each slot stores only one notifier at any particular
moment. Flushing removes it from the slot and the slot automatically replaces
it with a new notifier. All operations with notifiers are done by specifying
an index of a slot it's currently in.

When registering a notification the userspace specifies a u64 tag for each
slot, which will be copied in notification completion entries as
cqe::user_data. cqe::res is 0 and cqe::flags is equal to wrap around u32
sequence number counting notifiers of a slot.

Changelog:

v3 -> v4
custom iov_iter handling

RFC v2 -> v3:
mem accounting for non-registered buffers
allow mixing registered and normal requests per notifier
notification flushing via IORING_OP_RSRC_UPDATE
TCP support
fix buffer indexing
fix io-wq ->uring_lock locking
fix bugs when mixing with MSG_ZEROCOPY
fix managed refs bugs in skbuff.c

RFC -> RFC v2:
remove additional overhead for non-zc from skb_release_data()
avoid msg propagation, hide extra bits of non-zc overhead
task_work based "buffer free" notifications
improve io_uring's notification refcounting
added 5/19, (no pfmemalloc tracking)
added 8/19 and 9/19 preventing small copies with zc
misc small changes

David Ahern (1):
net: Allow custom iter handler in msghdr

Pavel Begunkov (26):
ipv4: avoid partial copy for zc
ipv6: avoid partial copy for zc
skbuff: don't mix ubuf_info from different sources
skbuff: add SKBFL_DONT_ORPHAN flag
skbuff: carry external ubuf_info in msghdr
net: introduce managed frags infrastructure
net: introduce __skb_fill_page_desc_noacc
ipv4/udp: support externally provided ubufs
ipv6/udp: support externally provided ubufs
tcp: support externally provided ubufs
io_uring: initialise msghdr::msg_ubuf
io_uring: export io_put_task()
io_uring: add zc notification infrastructure
io_uring: cache struct io_notif
io_uring: complete notifiers in tw
io_uring: add rsrc referencing for notifiers
io_uring: add notification slot registration
io_uring: wire send zc request type
io_uring: account locked pages for non-fixed zc
io_uring: allow to pass addr into sendzc
io_uring: sendzc with fixed buffers
io_uring: flush notifiers after sendzc
io_uring: rename IORING_OP_FILES_UPDATE
io_uring: add zc notification flush requests
io_uring: enable managed frags with register buffers
selftests/io_uring: test zerocopy send

include/linux/io_uring_types.h | 37 ++
include/linux/skbuff.h | 66 +-
include/linux/socket.h | 5 +
include/uapi/linux/io_uring.h | 45 +-
io_uring/Makefile | 2 +-
io_uring/io_uring.c | 42 +-
io_uring/io_uring.h | 22 +
io_uring/net.c | 187 ++++++
io_uring/net.h | 4 +
io_uring/notif.c | 215 +++++++
io_uring/notif.h | 87 +++
io_uring/opdef.c | 24 +-
io_uring/rsrc.c | 55 +-
io_uring/rsrc.h | 16 +-
io_uring/tctx.h | 26 -
net/compat.c | 1 +
net/core/datagram.c | 14 +-
net/core/skbuff.c | 37 +-
net/ipv4/ip_output.c | 50 +-
net/ipv4/tcp.c | 32 +-
net/ipv6/ip6_output.c | 49 +-
net/socket.c | 3 +
tools/testing/selftests/net/Makefile | 1 +
.../selftests/net/io_uring_zerocopy_tx.c | 605 ++++++++++++++++++
.../selftests/net/io_uring_zerocopy_tx.sh | 131 ++++
25 files changed, 1628 insertions(+), 128 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 io_uring/notif.c
create mode 100644 io_uring/notif.h
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/net/io_uring_zerocopy_tx.c
create mode 100755 tools/testing/selftests/net/io_uring_zerocopy_tx.sh

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2.36.1