On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 03:01:23PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
From: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> This patch adds queue steering to virtio-scsi. When a target is sent multiple requests, we always drive them to the same queue so that FIFO processing order is kept. However, if a target was idle, we can choose a queue arbitrarily. In this case the queue is chosen according to the current VCPU, so the driver expects the number of request queues to be equal to the number of VCPUs. This makes it easy and fast to select the queue, and also lets the driver optimize the IRQ affinity for the virtqueues (each virtqueue's affinity is set to the CPU that "owns" the queue). The speedup comes from improving cache locality and giving CPU affinity to the virtqueues, which is why this scheme was selected. Assuming that the thread that is sending requests to the device is I/O-bound, it is likely to be sleeping at the time the ISR is executed, and thus executing the ISR on the same processor that sent the requests is cheap. However, the kernel will not execute the ISR on the "best" processor unless you explicitly set the affinity. This is because in practice you will have many such I/O-bound processes and thus many otherwise idle processors. Then the kernel will execute the ISR on a random processor, rather than the one that is sending requests to the device. The alternative to per-CPU virtqueues is per-target virtqueues. To achieve the same locality, we could dynamically choose the virtqueue's affinity based on the CPU of the last task that sent a request. This is less appealing because we do not set the affinity directly---we only provide a hint to the irqbalanced running in userspace. Dynamically changing the affinity only works if the userspace applies the hint fast enough.
Looks good! Tested as V5. Tested-by: Venkatesh Srinivas <venkateshs@xxxxxxxxxx> -- vs; -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
