Sorry for being late to submit this patch. I have spent lots of time trying to find the best approach. This effort is still going on... This patch is built against net-next tree. This is an experimental RFC patch. The purpose of this patch is to address KVM networking scalability and NUMA scheduling issue. The existing implementation of vhost creats a vhost thread per-device (virtio_net) based. RX and TX work of a VMs per-device is handled by same vhost thread. One of the limitation of this implementation is with increasing the number VMs or the number of virtio-net interfces, more vhost threads are created, it will consume more kernel resources, and induce more threads context switches/scheduling overhead. We noticed that the KVM network performance doesn't scale with increasing number of VMs. The other limitation is to have single vhost thread to process both RX and TX, the work will be blocked. So we create this per cpu vhost thread implementation. The number of vhost cpu threads is limited to the number of cpus on the host. To address these limitations, we are propsing a per-cpu vhost thread model where the number of vhost threads are limited and equal to the number of online cpus on the host. Based on our testing experience, the vcpus can be scheduled across cpu sockets even when the number of vcpus is smaller than the number of cores per cpu socket and there is no other activities besides KVM networking workload. We found that if vhost thread is scheduled on the same socket as the work is received, the performance will be better. So in this per cpu vhost thread implementation, a vhost thread is selected dynamically based on where the TX/RX work is initiated. A vhost thread on the same cpu socket is selected but not on the same cpu as the vcpu/interrupt thread that initizated the TX/RX work. When we test this RFC patch, the other interesting thing we found is the performance results also seem related to NIC flow steering. We are spending time on evaluate different NICs flow director implementation now. We will enhance this patch based on our findings later. We have tried different scheduling: per-device based, per vq based and per work type (tx_kick, rx_kick, tx_net, rx_net) based vhost scheduling, we found that so far the per vq based scheduling is good enough for now. We also tried different algorithm to select which cpu vhost thread will running on a specific cpu socket: avg_load balance, and randomly... >From our test results, we found that the scalability has been significantly improved. And this patch is also helpful for small packets performance. Hoever, we are seeing some regressions in a local guest to guest scenario on a 8 cpu NUMA system. In one case, 24 VMs 256 bytes tcp_stream test shows it has improved from 810Mb/s to 9.1Gb/s. :) (We created two local VMs, and each VM has 2 vcpus. W/o this patch, the number of threads is 4 vcpus + 2 vhosts = 6, w/i this patch is 4 vcpus + 8 vhosts = 12. It causes more context switches. When I change the scheduling to use 2-4 vhost threads, the regressions are gone. I am continue investigation on how to make small number of VMs, local guest to gues performance better. Once I find the clue, I will share here.) The cpu hotplug support hasn't in place yet. I will post it later. Since we have per cpu vhost thread, each vhost thread will handle multiple vqs, so we will be able to reduce/remove vq notification when the work is heavy loaded in future. Here is my test results for remote host to guest test: tcp_rrs, udp_rrs, tcp_stream with guest has 2 vpus, host has two cpu socket, each socket has 4 cores. TCP_STREAM 256 512 1K 2K 4K 8K 16K -------------------------------------------------------------------- Original H->Guest 2501 4238 4744 5256 7203 6975 5799 Patch H->Guest 1676 2290 3149 8026 8439 8283 8216 Original Guest->H 744 1773 5675 1397 8207 7296 8117 Patch Guest->Host 1041 1386 5407 7057 8298 8127 8241 60 instances TCP_RRs: Patch 150K trans/s vs. 91K trans/sec 65% improved with taskset vcpus on the same socket 60 instances UDP_RRs: Patch 172K trans/s vs. 103K trans/s 67% improved with taskset vcpus on the same socket Tom has run 1VM to 24 VMs test for different work. He will post it here soon. If the host scheduler ensures that the VM's vcpus are not scheduled to another socket (i.e. cpu mask the vcpus on same socket) then the performance will be better. Signed-off-by: Shirley Ma <xma@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Krishna Kumar <krkumar2@xxxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Tom Lendacky <toml@xxxxxxxxxx> --- drivers/vhost/net.c | 26 ++- drivers/vhost/vhost.c | 289 +++++++++++++++++++++++---------- drivers/vhost/vhost.h | 16 ++- 3 files changed, 232 insertions(+), 103 deletions(-) Thanks Shirley -- 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
