Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposed patch: huge RX speedup for hw/e1000.c

[Jan Kiszka]

Please keep CCs.

On 2012-05-30 23:23, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
>> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 10:23:11PM +0200, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> ...
>>> The problem was fixed by the following one-line addition to
>>> hw/e1000.c :: e1000_mmio_write() , to wakeup the qemu mainloop and
>>> check that some buffers might be available.
>>>
>>>     --- hw/e1000.c.orig  2012-02-17 20:45:39.000000000 +0100
>>>     +++ hw/e1000.c  2012-05-30 20:01:52.000000000 +0200
>>>     @@ -919,6 +926,7 @@
>>>              DBGOUT(UNKNOWN, "MMIO unknown write 
>>> addr=0x%08x,val=0x%08"PRIx64"\n",
>>>                     index<<2, val);
>>>          }
>>>     +    qemu_notify_event();
>>>      }
>>>
>>>      static uint64_t
>>>
>>> With this fix, the read throughput reaches 1 Mpps matching the write
>>> speed. Now the system becomes CPU-bound, but this opens the way to
>>> more optimizations in the emulator.
>>>
>>> The same problem seems to exist on other network drivers, e.g.
>>> hw/rtl8139.c and others. The only one that seems to get it
>>> right is virtio-net.c
>>>
>>> I think it would be good if this change could make it into
>>> the tree.
>>>
>>> [Note 1] Netmap ( http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap )
>>>     is an efficient mechanism for packet I/O that bypasses
>>>     the network stack and provides protected access to the
>>>     network adapter from userspace.
>>>     It works especially well on top of qemu because the
>>>     kernel needs only to trap a single register access
>>>     for each batch of packets.
>>>
>>> [Note 2] the custom backend is a virtual local ethernet
>>>     called VALE, implemented as a kernel module on the host,
>>>     that extends netmap to implement communication
>>>     between virtual machines.
>>>     VALE is extremely efficient, currently delivering about
>>>     10~Mpps with 60-byte frames, and 5~Mpps with 1500-byte frames.
>>>     The 1 Mpps rates i mentioned are obtained between qemu instances
>>>     running in userspace on FreeBSD (no kernel acceleration whatsoever)
>>>     and using VALE as a communication mechanism.
>>
>> "Custom backend" == you patched QEMU? Or what backend are you using?
>>
>> This sounds a lot like [1] and suggests that you are either a) using
>> slirp in a version that doesn't contain that fix yet (before 1.1-rcX) or
>> b) wrote a backend that suffers from a similar bug.
>>
>> Jan
>>
>> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/144433
> 
> my custom backend is the one in [Note 2] above.
> It replaces the -net pcap/user/tap/socket option which defines
> how qemu communicate with the host network device.

Any code to share? It's hard to discuss just concepts.

> 
> The problem is not in my module, but rather in the emulation
> device exposed to the guest, and i presume this is the same thing
> you fixed in the "slirp" patch.
> I checked the git version http://git.qemu.org/qemu.git
> and most guest-side devices have the same problem,
> only virtio-net does the notification.

And that is most likely wrong. The bug I cited was not a front-end issue
but clearly one of the backend. It lacked kicking of the io-thread once
its queue state changed in a way that was not reported otherwise (via
some file descriptor the io-thread is subscribed to). If your backend
creates such states as well, it has to fix it similarly.

Again, discussing this abstractly is not very efficient.

Jan

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