Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 0/1] Don't obey the kernel block device max transfer len / max segments for raw block devices

[Pankaj Gupta]

> Linux block devices, even in O_DIRECT mode don't have any user visible
> limit on transfer size / number of segments, which underlying kernel block
> device can have.
> The kernel block layer takes care of enforcing these limits by splitting the
> bios.
> 
> By limiting the transfer sizes, we force qemu to do the splitting itself
> which
> introduces various overheads.
> It is especially visible in nbd server, where the low max transfer size of
> the
> underlying device forces us to advertise this over NBD, thus increasing the
> traffic overhead in case of image conversion which benefits from large
> blocks.
> 
> More information can be found here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1647104
> 
> Tested this with qemu-img convert over nbd and natively and to my 
> surprise,Reviewed-by: Stefano Garzarella <address@hidden>
> even native IO performance improved a bit.
> 
> (The device on which it was tested is Intel Optane DC P4800X,
> which has 128k max transfer size reported by the kernel)
> 
> The benchmark:
> 
> Images were created using:
> 
> Sparse image:  qemu-img create -f qcow2 /dev/nvme0n1p3 1G / 10G / 100G
> Allocated image: qemu-img create -f qcow2 /dev/nvme0n1p3 -o
> preallocation=metadata  1G / 10G / 100G
> 
> The test was:
> 
>  echo "convert native:"
>  rm -rf /dev/shm/disk.img
>  time qemu-img convert -p -f qcow2 -O raw -T none $FILE /dev/shm/disk.img >
>  /dev/zero
> 
>  echo "convert via nbd:"
>  qemu-nbd -k /tmp/nbd.sock -v  -f qcow2 $FILE -x export --cache=none
>  --aio=native --fork
>  rm -rf /dev/shm/disk.img
>  time qemu-img convert -p -f raw -O raw
>  nbd:unix:/tmp/nbd.sock:exportname=export /dev/shm/disk.img > /dev/zero
> 
> The results:
> 
> =========================================
> 1G sparse image:
>  native:
>       before: 0.027s
>       after: 0.027s
>  nbd:
>       before: 0.287s
>       after: 0.035s
> 
> =========================================
> 100G sparse image:
>  native:
>       before: 0.028s
>       after: 0.028s
>  nbd:
>       before: 23.796s
>       after: 0.109s
> 
> =========================================
> 1G preallocated image:
>  native:
>        before: 0.454s
>        after: 0.427s
>  nbd:
>        before: 0.649s
>        after: 0.546s
> 
> The block limits of max transfer size/max segment size are retained
> for the SCSI passthrough because in this case the kernel passes the userspace
> request
> directly to the kernel scsi driver, bypassing the block layer, and thus there
> is no code to split
> such requests.
> 
> Fam, since you was the original author of the code that added
> these limits, could you share your opinion on that?
> What was the reason besides SCSI passthrough?
> 
> V2:
> 
> *  Manually tested to not break the scsi passthrough with a nested VM
> *  As Eric suggested, refactored the area around the fstat.
> *  Spelling/grammar fixes
> 
> Best regards,
>       Maxim Levitsky
> 
> Maxim Levitsky (1):
>   raw-posix.c - use max transfer length / max segement count only for
>     SCSI passthrough
> 
>  block/file-posix.c | 54 ++++++++++++++++++++++++----------------------
>  1 file changed, 28 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)
> 
> --

I am not familiar with SCSI passthrough special case. But overall looks good to 
me.

Feel free to add:
Reviewed-by: Pankaj Gupta <address@hidden>

> 2.17.2
> 
> 
>