Re: Accelerating non-standard disk types

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>]

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On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 03:06:20AM +0000, Raphael Norwitz wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 05:00:04PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 06:39:39PM +0000, Raphael Norwitz wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 03:53:52PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > > > On 5/16/22 19:38, Raphael Norwitz wrote:
> > > > > [1] Keep using the SCSI translation in QEMU but back vDisks with a
> > > > > vhost-user-scsi or vhost-user-blk backend device.
> > > > > [2] Implement SATA and IDE emulation with vfio-user (likely with an SPDK
> > > > > client?).
> > > > > [3] We've also been looking at your libblkio library. From your
> > > > > description in
> > > > > https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lists.gnu.org_archive_html_qemu-2Ddevel_2021-2D04_msg06146.html&d=DwICaQ&c=s883GpUCOChKOHiocYtGcg&r=In4gmR1pGzKB8G5p6LUrWqkSMec2L5EtXZow_FZNJZk&m=wBSqcw0cal3wPP87YIKgFgmqMHjGCC3apYf4wCn1SIrX6GW_FR-J9wO68v-cyrpn&s=CP-6ZY-gqgQ2zLAJdR8WVTrMBoqmFHilGvW_qnf2myU&e=   it
> > > > > sounds like it may definitely play a role here, and possibly provide the
> > > > > nessesary abstractions to back I/O from these emulated disks to any
> > > > > backends we may want?
> > > > 
> > > > First of all: have you benchmarked it?  How much time is spent on MMIO vs.
> > > > disk I/O?
> > > >
> > > 
> > > Good point - we haven’t benchmarked the emulation, exit and translation
> > > overheads - it is very possible speeding up disk I/O may not have a huge
> > > impact. We would definitely benchmark this before exploring any of the
> > > options seriously, but as you rightly note, performance is not the only
> > > motivation here.
> > > 
> > > > Of the options above, the most interesting to me is to implement a
> > > > vhost-user-blk/vhost-user-scsi backend in QEMU, similar to the NVMe one,
> > > > that would translate I/O submissions to virtqueue (including polling and the
> > > > like) and could be used with SATA.
> > > >
> > > 
> > > We were certainly eyeing [1] as the most viable in the immediate future.
> > > That said, since a vhost-user-blk driver has been added to libblkio, [3]
> > > also sounds like a strong option. Do you see any long term benefit to
> > > translating SATA/IDE submissions to virtqueues in a world where libblkio
> > > is to be adopted?
> > >
> > > > For IDE specifically, I'm not sure how much it can be sped up since it has
> > > > only 1 in-flight operation.  I think using KVM coalesced I/O could provide
> > > > an interesting boost (assuming instant or near-instant reply from the
> > > > backend).  If all you're interested in however is not really performance,
> > > > but rather having a single "connection" to your back end, vhost-user is
> > > > certainly an option.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Interesting - I will take a look at KVM coalesced I/O.
> > > 
> > > You’re totally right though, performance is not our main interest for
> > > these disk types. I should have emphasized offload rather than
> > > acceleration and performance. We would prefer to QA and support as few
> > > data paths as possible, and a vhost-user offload mechanism would allow
> > > us to use the same path for all I/O. I imagine other QEMU users who
> > > offload to backends like SPDK and use SATA/IDE disk types may feel
> > > similarly?
> > 
> > It's nice to have a single target (e.g. vhost-user-blk in SPDK) that
> > handles all disk I/O. On the other hand, QEMU would still have the
> > IDE/SATA emulation and libblkio vhost-user-blk driver, so in the end it
> > may not reduce the amount of code that you need to support.
> > 
> 
> Apologies for the late reply - I was on PTO.
> 
> For us it’s not so much about the overall LOC we support. We have our
> own iSCSI client implementation with embedded business logic which we
> use for SCSI disks. Continuing to support SATA and IDE disks without our
> implementation has been really troublesome so, even if it means more
> LOC, we would really like to unify our data path at least at the iSCSI
> layer.
> 
> While the overall code may not be reduced so much for many others today,
> it may make a significant difference in the future. I can imagine some
> QEMU users may want to deprecate (or not implement) iSCSI target support
> in favor of NVMe over fabrics and still support these disk types. Being
> able to offload the transport layer via vhost-user-blk (either with some
> added logic on top of the existing SCSI translation layer or with
> libblkio) would make this easy.
> 
> Does that sound reasonable?

Yes.

Stefan

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