Re: [Qemu-devel] Performance about x-data-plane

[Weiwei Jia]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 12:02:14PM -0500, Weiwei Jia wrote:
>> > The expensive part is the virtqueue kick.  Recently we tried polling the
>> > virtqueue instead of waiting for the ioeventfd file descriptor and got
>> > double-digit performance improvements:
>> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-12/msg00148.html
>> >
>> > If you want to understand the performance of your benchmark you'll have
>> > compare host/guest disk stats (e.g. request lifetime, disk utilization,
>> > queue depth, average request size) to check that the bare metal and
>> > guest workloads are really sending comparable I/O patterns to the
>> > physical disk.
>> >
>> > Then you using Linux and/or QEMU tracing to analyze the request latency
>> > by looking at interesting points in the request lifecycle like virtqueue
>> > kick, host Linux AIO io_submit(2), etc.
>> >
>>
>> Thank you. I will look into "polling the virtqueue" as you said above.
>> Currently, I just use blktrace to see disk stats and add logs in the
>> I/O workload to see the time latency for each request. What kind of
>> tools are you using to analyze request lifecycle like virtqueue kick,
>> host Linux AIO iosubmit, etc.
>>
>> Do you trace the lifecycle like this
>> (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Virtio/Block/Latency#Performance_data)
>> but it seems to be out of date. Does it
>> (http://repo.or.cz/qemu-kvm/stefanha.git/shortlog/refs/heads/tracing-dev-0.12.4)
>> still work on QEMU 2.4.1?
>
> The details are out of date but the general approach to tracing the I/O
> request lifecycle still apply.
>
> There are multiple tracing tools that can do what you need.  I've CCed
> Karl Rister who did the latest virtio-blk dataplane tracing.
>
> "perf record -a -e kvm:\*" is a good start.  You can use "perf probe" to
> trace QEMU's trace events (recent versions have sdt support, which means
> SystemTap tracepoints work) and also trace any function in QEMU:
> http://blog.vmsplice.net/2011/03/how-to-use-perf-probe.html

Thank you. I will try it.


Best,
Weiwei Jia