On 12/4/20 10:06 AM, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
Hi Mike,
On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 01:56:25AM -0600, Mike Christie wrote:
These patches were made over mst's vhost branch.
The following patches, made over mst's vhost branch, allow userspace
to set each vq's cpu affinity. Currently, with cgroups the worker thread
inherits the affinity settings, but we are at the mercy of the CPU
scheduler for where the vq's IO will be executed on. This can result in
the scheduler sometimes hammering a couple queues on the host instead of
spreading it out like how the guest's app might have intended if it was
mq aware.
This version of the patches is not what you guys were talking about
initially like with the interface that was similar to nbd's old
(3.x kernel days) NBD_DO_IT ioctl where userspace calls down to the
kernel and we run from that context. These patches instead just
allow userspace to tell the kernel which CPU a vq should run on.
We then use the kernel's workqueue code to handle the thread
management.
I agree that reusing kernel's workqueue code would be a good strategy.
One concern is how easy it is to implement an adaptive polling strategy
using workqueues. From what I've seen, adding some polling of both
backend and virtqueue helps to eliminate interrupts and reduce latency.
Would the polling you need to do be similar to the vhost net poll code
like in vhost_net_busy_poll (different algorithm though)? But, we want
to be able to poll multiple devs/vqs from the same CPU right? Something
like:
retry:
for each poller on CPU N
if poller has work
driver->run work fn
if (poll limit hit)
return
else
cpu_relax();
goto retry:
?
If so, I had an idea for it. Let me send an additional patch on top of
this set.
