Re: Increased memory usage with scsi-mq

Richard W.M. Jones
2017-08-10T12:22:38Z

On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 06:50:10PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 09/08/2017 18:01, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 07, 2017 at 03:07:48PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> >> can_queue should depend on the virtqueue size, which unfortunately can
> >> vary for each virtio-scsi device in theory. The virtqueue size is
> >> retrieved by drivers/virtio prior to calling vring_create_virtqueue, and
> >> in QEMU it is the second argument to virtio_add_queue.
> >
> > Why is that unfortunate? We don't even have to set can_queue in
> > the host template, we can dynamically set it on per-host basis.
>
> Ah, cool, I thought allocations based on can_queue happened already in
> scsi_host_alloc, but they happen at scsi_add_host time.

I think I've decoded all that information into the patch below.

I tested it, and it appears to work: when I set cmd_per_lun on the
qemu command line, I see that the guest can add more disks:

With scsi-mq enabled: 175 disks
cmd_per_lun not set: 177 disks *
cmd_per_lun=16: 776 disks *
cmd_per_lun=4: 1160 disks *
With scsi-mq disabled: 1755 disks
* = new result

>From my point of view, this is a good result, but you should be warned
that I don't fully understand what's going on here and I may have made
obvious or not-so-obvious mistakes.

I tested the performance impact and it's not noticable in the
libguestfs case even with very small cmd_per_lun settings, but
libguestfs is largely serial and so this result won't be applicable to
guests in general.

Also, should the guest kernel validate cmd_per_lun to make sure it's
not too small or large? And if so, what would the limits be?

Rich.

>From e923e49846189b2f55f3f02b70a290d4be237ed5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:21:47 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] scsi: virtio_scsi: Set can_queue based on cmd_per_lun passed
by hypervisor.

Signed-off-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>
---
drivers/scsi/virtio_scsi.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/drivers/scsi/virtio_scsi.c b/drivers/scsi/virtio_scsi.c
index 9be211d68b15..b22591e9b16b 100644
--- a/drivers/scsi/virtio_scsi.c
+++ b/drivers/scsi/virtio_scsi.c
@@ -973,7 +973,7 @@ static int virtscsi_probe(struct virtio_device *vdev)
goto virtscsi_init_failed;

cmd_per_lun = virtscsi_config_get(vdev, cmd_per_lun) ?: 1;
- shost->cmd_per_lun = min_t(u32, cmd_per_lun, shost->can_queue);
+ shost->cmd_per_lun = shost->can_queue = cmd_per_lun;
shost->max_sectors = virtscsi_config_get(vdev, max_sectors) ?: 0xFFFF;

/* LUNs > 256 are reported with format 1, so they go in the range
--
2.13.1

--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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