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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH net-next] xen-netback: improve guest-receive-side flow control




On 2013-11-29 18:03, Paul Durrant wrote:
Can you describe it in more details? What kind of scenarios does this
issue happen? I assume current xenvif_count_skb_slots() returns accurate
value now.

Ok, I'll elaborate a bit for the record...

The way that flow control works without this patch is that, in start_xmit the 
code uses xenvif_count_skb_slots() to predict how many slots xenvif_gop_skb() 
will consume and then adds this to a 'req_cons_peek' counter which it then uses 
to determine if that shared ring has that amount of space available by checking 
whether 'req_prod' has passed that value. If the ring doesn't have space the tx 
queue is stopped. xenvif_gop_skb() will then consume slots and update 
'req_cons' and issue responses, updating 'rsp_prod' as it goes. The frontend 
will consume those responses and post new requests, by updating req_prod. So, 
req_prod chases req_cons which chases rsp_prod, and can never exceed that 
value. Thus if xenvif_count_skb_slots() ever returns a number of slots greater 
than xenvif_gop_skb() uses req_cons_peek will get to a value that req_prod 
cannot achieve (since it's limited by the 'real' req_cons) and, if this happens 
enough times, req_cons_peek gets more than a ring size ahead!
   of req_cons and the tx queue then remains stopped forever waiting for an 
unachievable amount of space to become available in the ring. It was fairly 
trivial to check that this was happening by adding a BUG_ON if the value 
calculated by xenvif_count_skb_slots() was ever different to that returned by 
xenvif_gob_skb(). Starting a simple SMB transfer between a couple of windows 
VMs was enough to trigger it.

So xenvif_count_skb_slots() not returning accurate vaule causes this issue.


Having two routines trying to calculate the same value is always going to be 
fragile, so this patch does away with that. All we essentially need to do is 
make sure that we have 'enough stuff' on our internal queue without letting it 
build up uncontrollably. So start_xmit makes a cheap optimistic check of how 
much space is needed for an skb and only turns the queue off if that is 
unachievable. net_rx_action() is the place where we could do with an accurate 
predicition but, since that has proven tricky to calculate, a cheap worse-case 
(but not too bad) estimate is all we really need since the only thing we *must* 
prevent is xenvif_gop_skb() consuming more slots than are available.

I also added some hysteresis as the code was pretty dumb in that respect and 
would wake the tx queue as soon as enough space for a single skb became 
available, basically leading to a lot of thrashing between the queue being 
stopped or active.

Does that explain?

This makes sense, thanks Paul.

Thanks
Annie


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