Re: [PATCH rdma-next 00/10] Enable relaxed ordering for ULPs

Jason Gunthorpe
2021-04-05T20:07:49Z

On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 03:41:15PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 08:23:54AM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > From: Leon Romanovsky <leonro@nvidia.com>
> >
> > >From Avihai,
> >
> > Relaxed Ordering is a PCIe mechanism that relaxes the strict ordering
> > imposed on PCI transactions, and thus, can improve performance.
> >
> > Until now, relaxed ordering could be set only by user space applications
> > for user MRs. The following patch series enables relaxed ordering for the
> > kernel ULPs as well. Relaxed ordering is an optional capability, and as
> > such, it is ignored by vendors that don't support it.
> >
> > The following test results show the performance improvement achieved
> > with relaxed ordering. The test was performed on a NVIDIA A100 in order
> > to check performance of storage infrastructure over xprtrdma:
>
> Isn't the Nvidia A100 a GPU not actually supported by Linux at all?
> What does that have to do with storage protocols?

I think it is a typo (or at least mit makes no sense to be talking
about NFS with a GPU chip) Probably it should be a DGX A100 which is a
dual socket AMD server with alot of PCIe, and xptrtrdma is a NFS-RDMA
workload.

AMD dual socket systems are well known to benefit from relaxed
ordering, people have been doing this in userspace for a while now
with the opt in.

What surprises me is the performance difference, I hadn't heard it is
4x!

Jason