netdev.vger.kernel.org archive mirror
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Greg Lindahl <greg@blekko.com>
To: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
	therbert@google.com, eric.dumazet@gmail.com,
	netdev@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] xps-mq: Transmit Packet Steering for multiqueue
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 23:41:36 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100902064136.GA8633@bx9.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20100901185627.239ad165@nehalam>

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 06:56:27PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

> Just to be contrarian :-) This same idea had started before when IBM
> proposed a user-space NUMA API.  It never got any traction, the concept
> of "lets make the applications NUMA aware" never got accepted because
> it is so hard to do right and fragile that it was the wrong idea
> to start with. The only people that can manage it are the engineers
> tweeking a one off database benchmark.

As an non-database user-space example, there are many applications
which know about the typical 'first touch' locality policy for pages
and use that to be NUMA-aware. Just about every OpenMP program ever
written does that; it's even fairly portable among OSes.

A second user-level example is MPI implementations such as OpenMPI.
Those guys run 1 process per core and they don't need to move around,
so getting process locked to a core and all the pages in the right
place is a nice win without the MPI programmer doing anything.

For kernel (but non-Ethernet) networking examples, HPC interconnects
typically go out of their way to ensure locality of kernel pages
related to a given core's workload.  Examples include Myrinet's
OpenMX+MPI and the InfiniPath InfiniBand adapater, whatever QLogic
renamed it to this week (TrueScale, I suppose.) How can you get ~ 1
microsecond messages if you've got a buffer in the wrong place?  Or
achieve extremely high messaging rates when you're waiting for remote
memory all the time?

> I would rather see a "good enough" policy in the kernel that works
> for everything from a single-core embedded system to a 100 core
> server environment.

I'd like a pony. Yes, it's challenging to directly aapply the above
networking example to Ethernet networking, but there's a pony in there
somewhere.

-- greg



  reply	other threads:[~2010-09-02  7:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 28+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-08-23  5:39 [PATCH] xps-mq: Transmit Packet Steering for multiqueue Tom Herbert
2010-08-23 17:09 ` Ben Hutchings
     [not found]   ` <AANLkTinST5zaS0NtBjrzyLbsg=w_EVsHE3DCDcrmQNc6@mail.gmail.com>
2010-08-23 17:50     ` Ben Hutchings
2010-08-23 17:59 ` Stephen Hemminger
2010-09-01 15:41   ` Tom Herbert
2010-09-01 15:54     ` Eric Dumazet
2010-09-01 16:24       ` Tom Herbert
2010-09-02  1:32         ` David Miller
2010-09-02  1:48           ` Stephen Hemminger
2010-09-02 16:00             ` Loke, Chetan
2010-09-02 19:52               ` Tom Herbert
2010-09-02 23:17                 ` Loke, Chetan
2010-09-02  1:56           ` Stephen Hemminger
2010-09-02  6:41             ` Greg Lindahl [this message]
2010-09-02 16:18             ` Loke, Chetan
2010-09-02 15:55           ` Loke, Chetan
2010-09-16 21:52           ` Ben Hutchings
2010-09-19 17:24             ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2010-09-20 12:44               ` [RFC][PATCH 1/3] IRQ: Add irq_get_numa_node() Ben Hutchings
2010-09-20 13:04                 ` Eric Dumazet
2010-09-20 12:45               ` [RFC][PATCH 2/3] ethtool: NUMA affinity control Ben Hutchings
2010-09-20 12:48               ` [RFC][PATCH 3/3] sfc: Add support for " Ben Hutchings
2011-02-21 18:19           ` [PATCH] xps-mq: Transmit Packet Steering for multiqueue Ben Hutchings
2011-02-21 19:31             ` Jeremy Eder
2011-02-26  7:09             ` David Miller
2010-09-01 16:09     ` David Miller
2010-08-24  4:31 ` Bill Fink
2010-08-24  4:37   ` Tom Herbert

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20100902064136.GA8633@bx9.net \
    --to=greg@blekko.com \
    --cc=davem@davemloft.net \
    --cc=eric.dumazet@gmail.com \
    --cc=netdev@vger.kernel.org \
    --cc=shemminger@vyatta.com \
    --cc=therbert@google.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).