Re: [PATCH] net: add initial support for AF_XDP network backend

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 at 05:28, Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 6:45 AM Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 6/27/23 04:54, Jason Wang wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 9:17 PM Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> On 6/26/23 08:32, Jason Wang wrote:
> > >>> On Sun, Jun 25, 2023 at 3:06 PM Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 5:58 AM Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org> wrote:
> > >> It is noticeably more performant than a tap with vhost=on in terms of PPS.
> > >> So, that might be one case.  Taking into account that just rcu lock and
> > >> unlock in virtio-net code takes more time than a packet copy, some batching
> > >> on QEMU side should improve performance significantly.  And it shouldn't be
> > >> too hard to implement.
> > >>
> > >> Performance over virtual interfaces may potentially be improved by creating
> > >> a kernel thread for async Tx.  Similarly to what io_uring allows.  Currently
> > >> Tx on non-zero-copy interfaces is synchronous, and that doesn't allow to
> > >> scale well.
> > >
> > > Interestingly, actually, there are a lot of "duplication" between
> > > io_uring and AF_XDP:
> > >
> > > 1) both have similar memory model (user register)
> > > 2) both use ring for communication
> > >
> > > I wonder if we can let io_uring talks directly to AF_XDP.
> >
> > Well, if we submit poll() in QEMU main loop via io_uring, then we can
> > avoid cost of the synchronous Tx for non-zero-copy modes, i.e. for
> > virtual interfaces.  io_uring thread in the kernel will be able to
> > perform transmission for us.
>
> It would be nice if we can use iothread/vhost other than the main loop
> even if io_uring can use kthreads. We can avoid the memory translation
> cost.

The QEMU event loop (AioContext) has io_uring code
(utils/fdmon-io_uring.c) but it's disabled at the moment. I'm working
on patches to re-enable it and will probably send them in July. The
patches also add an API to submit arbitrary io_uring operations so
that you can do stuff besides file descriptor monitoring. Both the
main loop and IOThreads will be able to use io_uring on Linux hosts.

Stefan