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



On 03/31/14 07:15, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 03:06:23PM -0700, Matthew Rushton wrote:
On 03/28/14 10:02, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 03:15:42PM -0700, Matthew Rushton wrote:
On 03/26/14 10:56, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 10:47:44AM -0700, Matthew Rushton wrote:
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.
OK, but that would not be the dma_alloc_coherent ones then? That sounds
more like the generic TCP mechanism allocated 64KB pages instead of 4KB
and used those.

Did you try looking at this hack that Ian proposed a long time ago
to verify that it is said problem?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/4/540

Yes I had seen that and intially had the same reaction but the
change was relatively recent and not relevant. I *think* all the
coherent allocations are ok since the swiotlb makes them contiguous.
The problem comes with the use of the streaming api. As one example
with jumbo frames enabled a driver might use larger rx buffers which
triggers the problem.

I think the right thing to do is to make the dma streaming api work
better with larger buffers on dom0. That way it works across all
OK.
drivers and device types regardless of how they were designed.
Can you point me to an example of the DMA streaming API?

I am not sure if you mean 'streaming API' as scatter gather operations
using DMA API?

Is there a particular easy way for me to reproduce this. I have
to say I hadn't enabled Jumbo frame on my box since I am not even
sure if the switch I have can do it. Is there a idiots-punch-list
of how to reproduce this?

Thanks!
By streaming API I'm just referring to drivers that use
dma_map_single/dma_unmap_single on every buffer instead of using
coherent allocations. So not related to sg in my case. If you want
an example of this you can look at the bnx2x Broadcom driver. To
reproduce this at a minimum you'll need to have:

1) Enough dom0 memory so it overlaps with PCI space and gets
remapped by Linux at boot
Hm? Could you give a bit details? As in is the:

[    0.000000] Allocating PCI resources starting at 7f800000 (gap: 
7f800000:7c800000)

value?

As in that value should be in the PCI space and I am not sure
how your dom0 memory overlaps? If you do say dom0_mem=max:3G
the kernel will balloon out of the MMIO regions and the gaps (so PCI space)
and put that memory past the 4GB. So the MMIO regions end up
being MMIO regions.

You should see the message from xen_do_chunk() about adding pages back. Something along the lines of:

Populating 380000-401fb6 pfn range: 542250 pages added

These pages get added in reverse order (mfns reversed) without my proposed Xen change.

2) A driver that uses dma_map_single/dma_unmap_single
OK,
3) Large enough buffers so that they span page boundaries
Um, right, so I think the get_order hack that was posted would
help in that so you would not span page boundaries?

That patch doesn't apply in my case but in principal you're right, any change that would decrease buffers spanning page boundaries would limit bounce buffer usage.

Things that may help with 3 are enabling jumbos and various offload
settings in either guests or dom0.
If you booted baremetal with 'iommu=soft swiotlb=force' the same
problem should show up - at least based on the 2) and 3) issue.

Well, except that there are no guests but one should be able to trigger
this.

If that forces the use of bounce buffers than it would be a similar net result if you wanted to see the performance overhead of doing the copies.

What do you use for driving traffic? iperf with certain parameters?

I was using netperf. There weren't any magic params to trigger this. I believe with the default tcp stream test I ran into the issue.



Thanks!

Are there any concerns about the proposed Xen change as a reasonable work around for the current implementation? Thank you!

--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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