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Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC PATCH] page_alloc: use first half of higher order chunks when halving



On 03/26/14 09:36, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 08:59:04AM -0700, Matthew Rushton wrote:
On 03/26/14 08:15, Matt Wilson wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:08:01AM -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
Could you elaborate a bit more on the use-case please?
My understanding is that most drivers use a scatter gather list - in which
case it does not matter if the underlaying MFNs in the PFNs spare are
not contingous.

But I presume the issue you are hitting is with drivers doing dma_map_page
and the page is not 4KB but rather large (compound page). Is that the
problem you have observed?
Drivers are using very large size arguments to dma_alloc_coherent()
for things like RX and TX descriptor rings.
Large size like larger than 512kB? That would also cause problems
on baremetal then when swiotlb is activated I believe.

I was looking at network IO performance so the buffers would not have been that large. I think large in this context is relative to the 4k page size and the odds of the buffer spanning a page boundary. For context I saw ~5-10% performance increase with guest network throughput by avoiding bounce buffers and also saw dom0 tcp streaming performance go from ~6Gb/s to over 9Gb/s on my test setup with a 10Gb NIC.


--msw
It's the dma streaming api I've noticed the problem with, so
dma_map_single(). Applicable swiotlb code would be
xen_swiotlb_map_page() and range_straddles_page_boundary(). So yes
for larger buffers it can cause bouncing.


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