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Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 00/10] aio: experimental virtio-blk polling m


From: Christian Borntraeger
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 00/10] aio: experimental virtio-blk polling mode
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 20:21:16 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.4.0

On 11/22/2016 05:31 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> v3:
>  * Avoid ppoll(2)/epoll_wait(2) if polling succeeded [Paolo]
>  * Disable guest->host virtqueue notification during polling [Christian]
>  * Rebased on top of my virtio-blk/scsi virtqueue notification disable patches
> 
> v2:
>  * Uninitialized node->deleted gone [Fam]
>  * Removed 1024 polling loop iteration qemu_clock_get_ns() optimization which
>    created a weird step pattern [Fam]
>  * Unified with AioHandler, dropped AioPollHandler struct [Paolo]
>    (actually I think Paolo had more in mind but this is the first step)
>  * Only poll when all event loop resources support it [Paolo]
>  * Added run_poll_handlers_begin/end trace events for perf analysis
>  * Sorry, Christian, no virtqueue kick suppression yet
> 
> Recent performance investigation work done by Karl Rister shows that the
> guest->host notification takes around 20 us.  This is more than the "overhead"
> of QEMU itself (e.g. block layer).
> 
> One way to avoid the costly exit is to use polling instead of notification.
> The main drawback of polling is that it consumes CPU resources.  In order to
> benefit performance the host must have extra CPU cycles available on physical
> CPUs that aren't used by the guest.
> 
> This is an experimental AioContext polling implementation.  It adds a polling
> callback into the event loop.  Polling functions are implemented for 
> virtio-blk
> virtqueue guest->host kick and Linux AIO completion.
> 
> The QEMU_AIO_POLL_MAX_NS environment variable sets the number of nanoseconds 
> to
> poll before entering the usual blocking poll(2) syscall.  Try setting this
> variable to the time from old request completion to new virtqueue kick.
> 
> By default no polling is done.  The QEMU_AIO_POLL_MAX_NS must be set to get 
> any
> polling!

The notification suppression alone gives me about 10% for a single disk in fio 
throughput.
(It seems that more disks make it help less???). If I set polling to high values
(e.g. 500000) then the guest->host notification rate basically drops to zero, 
so it seems
to work as expected. Polling also seems to provide some benefit in the range of 
another
10 percent (again only for a single disk?)

So in general this looks promising. We want to keep it disabled as here until we
have some grow/shrink heuristics. There is one thing that the kernel can do, 
which we
cannot easily (check if the CPU is contented) and avoid polling in that case. 
One wild
idea can be to use clock_gettime with CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID and 
CLOCK_REALTIME and
shrink polling if we have been scheduled away.

The case "number of iothreads > number of cpus" looks better than in v1. Have 
you fixed 
something?

> Stefan Hajnoczi (10):
>   virtio: add missing vdev->broken check
>   virtio-blk: suppress virtqueue kick during processing
>   virtio-scsi: suppress virtqueue kick during processing
>   aio: add AioPollFn and io_poll() interface
>   aio: add polling mode to AioContext
>   virtio: poll virtqueues for new buffers
>   linux-aio: poll ring for completions
>   virtio: turn vq->notification into a nested counter
>   aio: add .io_poll_begin/end() callbacks
>   virtio: disable virtqueue notifications during polling
> 
>  aio-posix.c                 | 197 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
>  async.c                     |  14 +++-
>  block/curl.c                |   8 +-
>  block/iscsi.c               |   3 +-
>  block/linux-aio.c           |  19 ++++-
>  block/nbd-client.c          |   8 +-
>  block/nfs.c                 |   7 +-
>  block/sheepdog.c            |  26 +++---
>  block/ssh.c                 |   4 +-
>  block/win32-aio.c           |   4 +-
>  hw/block/virtio-blk.c       |  18 ++--
>  hw/scsi/virtio-scsi.c       |  36 ++++----
>  hw/virtio/virtio.c          |  60 ++++++++++++--
>  include/block/aio.h         |  28 ++++++-
>  iohandler.c                 |   2 +-
>  nbd/server.c                |   9 +-
>  stubs/set-fd-handler.c      |   1 +
>  tests/test-aio.c            |   4 +-
>  trace-events                |   4 +
>  util/event_notifier-posix.c |   2 +-
>  20 files changed, 378 insertions(+), 76 deletions(-)
> 




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