Re: [RFC PATCH v2 00/11] Device Memory TCP

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Am 10.08.23 um 03:57 schrieb Mina Almasry:
Changes in RFC v2:
------------------

The sticking point in RFC v1[1] was the dma-buf pages approach we used to
deliver the device memory to the TCP stack. RFC v2 is a proof-of-concept
that attempts to resolve this by implementing scatterlist support in the
networking stack, such that we can import the dma-buf scatterlist
directly.

Impressive work, I didn't thought that this would be possible that "easily".

Please note that we have considered replacing scatterlists with simple arrays of DMA-addresses in the DMA-buf framework to avoid people trying to access the struct page inside the scatterlist.

It might be a good idea to push for that first before this here is finally implemented.

GPU drivers already convert the scatterlist used to arrays of DMA-addresses as soon as they get them. This leaves RDMA and V4L as the other two main users which would need to be converted.

  This is the approach proposed at a high level here[2].

Detailed changes:
1. Replaced dma-buf pages approach with importing scatterlist into the
    page pool.
2. Replace the dma-buf pages centric API with a netlink API.
3. Removed the TX path implementation - there is no issue with
    implementing the TX path with scatterlist approach, but leaving
    out the TX path makes it easier to review.
4. Functionality is tested with this proposal, but I have not conducted
    perf testing yet. I'm not sure there are regressions, but I removed
    perf claims from the cover letter until they can be re-confirmed.
5. Added Signed-off-by: contributors to the implementation.
6. Fixed some bugs with the RX path since RFC v1.

Any feedback welcome, but specifically the biggest pending questions
needing feedback IMO are:

1. Feedback on the scatterlist-based approach in general.

As far as I can see this sounds like the right thing to do in general.

Question is rather if we should stick with scatterlist, use array of DMA-addresses or maybe even come up with a completely new structure.

2. Netlink API (Patch 1 & 2).

How does netlink manage the lifetime of objects?

3. Approach to handle all the drivers that expect to receive pages from
    the page pool (Patch 6).

Can't say anything about that. I know TCP/IP inside out, but I'm a GPU and not a network driver author.

Regards,
Christian.


[1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/dfe4bae7-13a0-3c5d-d671-f61b375cb0b4@xxxxxxxxx/T/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/CAHS8izPm6XRS54LdCDZVd0C75tA1zHSu6jLVO8nzTLXCc=H7Nw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/

----------------------

* TL;DR:

Device memory TCP (devmem TCP) is a proposal for transferring data to and/or
from device memory efficiently, without bouncing the data to a host memory
buffer.

* Problem:

A large amount of data transfers have device memory as the source and/or
destination. Accelerators drastically increased the volume of such transfers.
Some examples include:
- ML accelerators transferring large amounts of training data from storage into
   GPU/TPU memory. In some cases ML training setup time can be as long as 50% of
   TPU compute time, improving data transfer throughput & efficiency can help
   improving GPU/TPU utilization.

- Distributed training, where ML accelerators, such as GPUs on different hosts,
   exchange data among them.

- Distributed raw block storage applications transfer large amounts of data with
   remote SSDs, much of this data does not require host processing.

Today, the majority of the Device-to-Device data transfers the network are
implemented as the following low level operations: Device-to-Host copy,
Host-to-Host network transfer, and Host-to-Device copy.

The implementation is suboptimal, especially for bulk data transfers, and can
put significant strains on system resources, such as host memory bandwidth,
PCIe bandwidth, etc. One important reason behind the current state is the
kernel’s lack of semantics to express device to network transfers.

* Proposal:

In this patch series we attempt to optimize this use case by implementing
socket APIs that enable the user to:

1. send device memory across the network directly, and
2. receive incoming network packets directly into device memory.

Packet _payloads_ go directly from the NIC to device memory for receive and from
device memory to NIC for transmit.
Packet _headers_ go to/from host memory and are processed by the TCP/IP stack
normally. The NIC _must_ support header split to achieve this.

Advantages:

- Alleviate host memory bandwidth pressure, compared to existing
  network-transfer + device-copy semantics.

- Alleviate PCIe BW pressure, by limiting data transfer to the lowest level
   of the PCIe tree, compared to traditional path which sends data through the
   root complex.

* Patch overview:

** Part 1: netlink API

Gives user ability to bind dma-buf to an RX queue.

** Part 2: scatterlist support

Currently the standard for device memory sharing is DMABUF, which doesn't
generate struct pages. On the other hand, networking stack (skbs, drivers, and
page pool) operate on pages. We have 2 options:

1. Generate struct pages for dmabuf device memory, or,
2. Modify the networking stack to process scatterlist.

Approach #1 was attempted in RFC v1. RFC v2 implements approach #2.

** part 3: page pool support

We piggy back on page pool memory providers proposal:
https://github.com/kuba-moo/linux/tree/pp-providers

It allows the page pool to define a memory provider that provides the
page allocation and freeing. It helps abstract most of the device memory
TCP changes from the driver.

** part 4: support for unreadable skb frags

Page pool iovs are not accessible by the host; we implement changes
throughput the networking stack to correctly handle skbs with unreadable
frags.

** Part 5: recvmsg() APIs

We define user APIs for the user to send and receive device memory.

Not included with this RFC is the GVE devmem TCP support, just to
simplify the review. Code available here if desired:
https://github.com/mina/linux/tree/tcpdevmem

This RFC is built on top of net-next with Jakub's pp-providers changes
cherry-picked.

* NIC dependencies:

1. (strict) Devmem TCP require the NIC to support header split, i.e. the
    capability to split incoming packets into a header + payload and to put
    each into a separate buffer. Devmem TCP works by using device memory
    for the packet payload, and host memory for the packet headers.

2. (optional) Devmem TCP works better with flow steering support & RSS support,
    i.e. the NIC's ability to steer flows into certain rx queues. This allows the
    sysadmin to enable devmem TCP on a subset of the rx queues, and steer
    devmem TCP traffic onto these queues and non devmem TCP elsewhere.

The NIC I have access to with these properties is the GVE with DQO support
running in Google Cloud, but any NIC that supports these features would suffice.
I may be able to help reviewers bring up devmem TCP on their NICs.

* Testing:

The series includes a udmabuf kselftest that show a simple use case of
devmem TCP and validates the entire data path end to end without
a dependency on a specific dmabuf provider.

** Test Setup

Kernel: net-next with this RFC and memory provider API cherry-picked
locally.

Hardware: Google Cloud A3 VMs.

NIC: GVE with header split & RSS & flow steering support.

Mina Almasry (11):
   net: add netdev netlink api to bind dma-buf to a net device
   netdev: implement netlink api to bind dma-buf to netdevice
   netdev: implement netdevice devmem allocator
   memory-provider: updates to core provider API for devmem TCP
   memory-provider: implement dmabuf devmem memory provider
   page-pool: add device memory support
   net: support non paged skb frags
   net: add support for skbs with unreadable frags
   tcp: implement recvmsg() RX path for devmem TCP
   net: add SO_DEVMEM_DONTNEED setsockopt to release RX pages
   selftests: add ncdevmem, netcat for devmem TCP

  Documentation/netlink/specs/netdev.yaml |  27 ++
  include/linux/netdevice.h               |  61 +++
  include/linux/skbuff.h                  |  54 ++-
  include/linux/socket.h                  |   1 +
  include/net/page_pool.h                 | 186 ++++++++-
  include/net/sock.h                      |   2 +
  include/net/tcp.h                       |   5 +-
  include/uapi/asm-generic/socket.h       |   6 +
  include/uapi/linux/netdev.h             |  10 +
  include/uapi/linux/uio.h                |  10 +
  net/core/datagram.c                     |   6 +
  net/core/dev.c                          | 214 ++++++++++
  net/core/gro.c                          |   2 +-
  net/core/netdev-genl-gen.c              |  14 +
  net/core/netdev-genl-gen.h              |   1 +
  net/core/netdev-genl.c                  | 103 +++++
  net/core/page_pool.c                    | 171 ++++++--
  net/core/skbuff.c                       |  80 +++-
  net/core/sock.c                         |  36 ++
  net/ipv4/tcp.c                          | 196 ++++++++-
  net/ipv4/tcp_input.c                    |  13 +-
  net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c                     |   7 +
  net/ipv4/tcp_output.c                   |   5 +-
  net/packet/af_packet.c                  |   4 +-
  tools/include/uapi/linux/netdev.h       |  10 +
  tools/net/ynl/generated/netdev-user.c   |  41 ++
  tools/net/ynl/generated/netdev-user.h   |  46 ++
  tools/testing/selftests/net/.gitignore  |   1 +
  tools/testing/selftests/net/Makefile    |   5 +
  tools/testing/selftests/net/ncdevmem.c  | 534 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
  30 files changed, 1787 insertions(+), 64 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/net/ncdevmem.c





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