From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=50074 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Pg5ur-0008Sy-Jv for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:35:54 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Pg5uq-00021z-2i for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:35:53 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:52343) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Pg5up-00021h-Nb for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:35:51 -0500 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] vhost: force vhost off for non-MSI guests From: Alex Williamson In-Reply-To: <4D38D208.4090403@codemonkey.ws> References: <20110120153521.GA24357@redhat.com> <4D38583D.9010602@codemonkey.ws> <20110120160718.GA24652@redhat.com> <4D38D208.4090403@codemonkey.ws> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:35:46 -0700 Message-ID: <1295573746.2931.59.camel@x201> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Anthony Liguori Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org, Quintela , Jes.Sorensen@redhat.com, Juan@gnu.org, "Michael S. Tsirkin" , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, jasowang@redhat.com On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 18:23 -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote: > On 01/20/2011 10:07 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 09:43:57AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote: > > > >> On 01/20/2011 09:35 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > >> > >>> When MSI is off, each interrupt needs to be bounced through the io > >>> thread when it's set/cleared, so vhost-net causes more context switches and > >>> higher CPU utilization than userspace virtio which handles networking in > >>> the same thread. > >>> > >>> We'll need to fix this by adding level irq support in kvm irqfd, > >>> for now disable vhost-net in these configurations. > >>> > >>> Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin > >>> > >> I actually think this should be a terminal error. The user asks for > >> vhost-net, if we cannot enable it, we should exit. > >> > >> Or we should warn the user that they should expect bad performance. > >> Silently doing something that the user has explicitly asked us not > >> to do is not a good behavior. > >> > >> Regards, > >> > >> Anthony Liguori > >> > > The issue is that user has no control of the guest, and can not know > > whether the guest enables MSI. So what you ask for will just make > > some guests fail, and others fail sometimes. > > The user also has no way to know that version X of kvm does not expose a > > way to inject level interrupts with irqfd. > > > > We could have *another* flag that says "use vhost where it helps" but > > then I think this is what everyone wants to do, anyway, and libvirt > > already sets vhost=on so I prefer redefining the meaning of an existing > > flag. > > > > In the very least, there needs to be a vhost=force. > > Having some sort of friendly default policy is fine but we need to > provide a mechanism for a user to have the final say. If you want to > redefine vhost=on to really mean, use the friendly default, that's fine > by me, but only if the vhost=force option exists. > > I actually would think libvirt would want to use vhost=force. Debugging > with vhost=on is going to be a royal pain in the ass if a user reports > bad performance. Given the libvirt XML, you can't actually tell from > the guest and the XML whether or not vhost was actually in use or not. If we add a force option, let's please distinguish hotplug from VM creation time. The latter can abort. Hotplug should print an error and fail the initfn. Thanks, Alex