Re: [PATCH 0/5] vhost: support upto 509 memory regions

Igor Mammedov
2015-06-16T22:19:29Z

On Tue, 16 Jun 2015 23:16:07 +0200
"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 06:33:34PM +0200, Igor Mammedov wrote:
> > Series extends vhost to support upto 509 memory regions,
> > and adds some vhost:translate_desc() performance improvemnts
> > so it won't regress when memslots are increased to 509.
> >
> > It fixes running VM crashing during memory hotplug due
> > to vhost refusing accepting more than 64 memory regions.
> >
> > It's only host kernel side fix to make it work with QEMU
> > versions that support memory hotplug. But I'll continue
> > to work on QEMU side solution to reduce amount of memory
> > regions to make things even better.
>
> I'm concerned userspace work will be harder, in particular,
> performance gains will be harder to measure.
it appears so, so far.

> How about a flag to disable caching?
I've tried to measure cost of cache miss but without much luck,
difference between version with cache and with caching removed
was within margin of error (±10ns) (i.e. not mensurable on my
5min/10*10^6 test workload).
Also I'm concerned about adding extra fetch+branch for flag
checking will make things worse for likely path of cache hit,
so I'd avoid it if possible.

Or do you mean a simple global per module flag to disable it and
wrap thing in static key so that it will be cheap jump to skip
cache?

> > Performance wise for guest with (in my case 3 memory regions)
> > and netperf's UDP_RR workload translate_desc() execution
> > time from total workload takes:
> >
> > Memory |1G RAM|cached|non cached
> > regions # | 3 | 53 | 53
> > ------------------------------------
> > upstream | 0.3% | - | 3.5%
> > ------------------------------------
> > this series | 0.2% | 0.5% | 0.7%
> >
> > where "non cached" column reflects trashing wokload
> > with constant cache miss. More details on timing in
> > respective patches.
> >
> > Igor Mammedov (5):
> > vhost: use binary search instead of linear in find_region()
> > vhost: extend memory regions allocation to vmalloc
> > vhost: support upto 509 memory regions
> > vhost: add per VQ memory region caching
> > vhost: translate_desc: optimization for desc.len < region size
> >
> > drivers/vhost/vhost.c | 95
> > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
> > drivers/vhost/vhost.h | 1 + 2 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 25
> > deletions(-)
> >
> > --
> > 1.8.3.1