We've been encountering an issue in the virtio-net driver that cause it
to become unresponsive after a period of high load. This issue goes
away if we disable TSO on the interface.
Once this issue has been triggered, the interface can still receive
traffic, but will not transmit anything.
Specifically:
* Initially the machine will still try to respond to packets (I say try,
because I see the packets in tcpdump, but the counters shown by 'ip -s
-d link show eth1' do not increment. I also do not see the packets make
it to the upstream network interface)
* After a little while (1-2 minutes), I stop seeing the response packets
in tcpdump. (In this case I'm looking for ARP request/replies, so the
requests still come in, but the responses do not go out. This is not
limited to just ARP, the interface will not respond at all)
* If I leave a ping running while the interface is broken, eventually I
start seeing 'ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available'
I've reproduced this on a few Ubuntu kernel builds (3.13.0-53-generic
and 4.0.7-040007-generic), and a few CentOS kernels
(2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64, 4.1.1-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64) so I do not
believe this to be distribution specific.
If I restart the machine (just issuing a server level 'reboot' command,
not restarting qemu itself), the adapter starts working properly again.
Interestingly, these machines have two virtio NICs, and this only seems
to occur for one of them (by this, I mean eth0 always works, and eth1
always breaks. If I remove eth0 from the machine, eth1 still breaks).
On the host level, the broken one is a macvtap interface, while the
working one is an tap device. We've seen this in the past with a
different interface type (the qemu multicast NIC type), so I do not
believe this is really relevant. If I switch the machines to using
emulated e1000 nics, I can no longer reproduce the issue.
Reproduction is fairly easy, with two machines run `nc -lk 1818 | pv >
/dev/null` on one, and `cat /dev/zero | pv | nc 10.99.0.100 1818` (the
machine sending traffic will break within a minute or two). I can
easily provide access to machines where the problem manifests, if that
would be helpful.
I'm not really sure where to go from here. Tracking down a bug in the
virtio driver is a bit above my skill level.
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