Re: [Xen-devel] [Hackathon minutes] PV block improvements

[Roger Pau Monnà <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24/06/13 13:06, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2013, Wei Liu wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 04:16:25PM -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 07:10:59PM +0200, Roger Pau Monnà wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> While working on further block improvements I've found an issue with
>>>> persistent grants in blkfront.
>>>>
>>>> Persistent grants basically allocate grants and then they are never
>>>> released, so both blkfront and blkback keep using the same memory pages
>>>> for all the transactions.
>>>>
>>>> This is not a problem in blkback, because we can dynamically choose how
>>>> many grants we want to map. On the other hand, blkfront cannot remove
>>>> the access to those grants at any point, because blkfront doesn't know
>>>> if blkback has this grants mapped persistently or not.
>>>>
>>>> So if for example we start expanding the number of segments in indirect
>>>> requests, to a value like 512 segments per requests, blkfront will
>>>> probably try to persistently map 512*32+512 = 16896 grants per device,
>>>> that's much more grants that the current default, which is 32*256 = 8192
>>>> (if using grant tables v2). This can cause serious problems to other
>>>> interfaces inside the DomU, since blkfront basically starts hoarding all
>>>> possible grants, leaving other interfaces completely locked.
>>>>
>>>> I've been thinking about different ways to solve this, but so far I
>>>> haven't been able to found a nice solution:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Limit the number of persistent grants a blkfront instance can use,
>>>> let's say that only the first X used grants will be persistently mapped
>>>> by both blkfront and blkback, and if more grants are needed the previous
>>>> map/unmap will be used.
>>>>
>>>> 2. Switch to grant copy in blkback, and get rid of persistent grants (I
>>>> have not benchmarked this solution, but I'm quite sure it will involve a
>>>> performance regression, specially when scaling to a high number of 
>>>> domains).
>>>>
>>
>> Any chance that the speed of copying is fast enough for block devices?
>>
>>>> 3. Increase the size of the grant_table or the size of a single grant
>>>> (from 4k to 2M) (this is from Stefano Stabellini).
>>>>
>>>> 4. Introduce a new request type that we can use to request blkback to
>>>> unmap certain grefs so we can free them in blkfront.
>>>
>>>
>>> 5). Lift the limit of grant pages a domain can have.
>>
>> If I'm not mistaken, this is basically the same as "increase the size of
>> the grant_table" in #3.
> 
> Yes, that was one of the things I was suggesting, but it needs
> investigating: I wouldn't want that increasing the number of grant
> frames would reach a different scalability limit of the data structure.

I don't think there's any implicit scalability limit in the data
structure itself, it's just an array and grants are ordered as
array[gref]. I've discussed with Stefano the usage of domain pages to
increase the size of the grant table, so instead of using xenheap pages
we could use domain pages and thus remove the limitation (since we will
be consuming domain memory). I have a very hacky prototype that uses
domain pages instead of xenheap pages for expanding the grant table, but
I think that before implementing this it would be more suitable to
implement #4, even if we are using domain pages to increase the grant
table, we need a way to allow blkfront to remove persistent grants, or
we will end up with a lot of unsused pages in blkfront after I/O bursts.


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