Hi, I've come across a problem with read and write disk IO performance when using O_DIRECT from within a kvm guest. With O_DIRECT, reads and writes are much slower with smaller block sizes. Depending on the block size used, I've seen 10 times slower. For example, with an 8k block size, reading directly from /dev/vdb without O_DIRECT I see 750 MB/s, but with O_DIRECT I see 79 MB/s. As a comparison, reading in O_DIRECT mode in 8k blocks directly from the backend device on the host gives 2.3 GB/s. Reading in O_DIRECT mode from a xen guest on the same hardware manages 263 MB/s. Writing is affected in the same way, and exhibits the same behaviour with O_SYNC too. Watching with vmstat on the host, I see the same number of blocks being read, but about 14 times the number of context switches in O_DIRECT mode (4500 cs vs. 63000 cs) and a little more cpu usage. The device I'm writing to is a device-mapper zero device that generates zeros on read and throws away writes, you can set it up at /dev/mapper/zero like this: echo "0 21474836480 zero" | dmsetup create zero My libvirt config for the disk is: <disk type='block' device='disk'> <driver cache='none'/> <source dev='/dev/mapper/zero'/> <target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/> </disk> which translates to the kvm arg: -device virtio-blk-pci,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0 -drive file=/dev/mapper/zero,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk1,cache=none I'm testing with dd: dd if=/dev/vdb of=/dev/null bs=8k iflag=direct As a side note, as you increase the block size read performance in O_DIRECT mode starts to overtake non O_DIRECT mode reads (from about 150k block size). By 550k block size I'm seeing 1 GB/s reads with O_DIRECT and 770 MB/s without. Of course I see this performance situation with real disks too, I just wanted to rule out the variables of moving metal around. I get the same situation on Centos 5.5 and the latest RHEL 6 beta (which is kvm 0.12 and kernel 2.6.32). Hardware is a Dell i510 with 64GB RAM and 12 Intel(R) Xeon(R) L5640 2.27GHz CPUs (running only one kvm guest with 1G ram). Host disk scheduler is deadline, guest disk scheduler is noop. Guest distro is Ubuntu Lucid, 2.6.32-22-server. I've tried with both 32bit pae and 64bit guest kernels. Anyone got any thoughts on this? Thanks, John. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
