[dpdk-dev] vhost-net stops sending to virito pmd -- already fixed?

[Kyle Larose]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 5:43 PM, Thomas Monjalon
<thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> 2015-09-11 12:32, Kyle Larose:
> > Looking through the version tree for virtio_rxtx.c, I saw the following
> > commit:
> >
> > http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk/commit/lib/librte_pmd_virtio?id=8c09c20fb4cde76e53d87bd50acf2b441ecf6eb8
> >
> > Does anybody know offhand if the issue fixed by that commit could be the
> > root cause of what I am seeing?
>
> I won't have the definitive answer but I would like to use your question
> to highlight a common issue in git messages:
>
> PLEASE, authors of fixes, explain the bug you are fixing and how it can
> be reproduced. Good commit messages are REALLY read and useful.
>
> Thanks
>

I've figured out what happened. It has nothing to do with the fix I
pasted above. Instead, the issue has to do with running low on mbufs.

Here's the general logic:

1. If packets are not queued, return
2. Fetch each queued packet, as an mbuf, into the provided array. This
may involve some merging/etc
3. Try to fill the virtio receive ring with new mbufs
  3.a. If we fail to allocate an mbuf, break out of the refill loop
4. Update the receive ring information and kick the host

This is obviously a simplification, but the key point is 3.a. If we
hit this logic when the virtio receive ring is completely used up, we
essentially lock up. The host will have no buffers with which to queue
packets, so the next time we poll, we will hit case 1. However, since
we hit case 1, we will not allocate mbufs to the virtio receive ring,
regardless of how many are now free. Rinse and repeat; we are stuck
until the pmd is restarted or the link is restarted.

This is very easy to reproduce when the mbuf pool is fairly small, and
packets are being passed to worker threads/processes which may
increase the length of the pipeline.

I took a quick look at the ixgbe driver, and it looks like it checks
if it needs to allocate mbufs to the ring before trying to pull
packets off the nic. Should we not be doing something similar for
virtio? Rather than breaking out early if no packets are queued, we
should first make sure there are resources with which to queue
packets!

One solution here is to increase the mbuf pool to a size where such
exhaustion is impossible, but that doesn't seem like a graceful
solution. For example, it may be desirable to drop packets rather than
have a large memory pool, and becoming stuck under such a situation is
not good. Further, it isn't easy to know the exact size required. You
may end up wasting a bunch of resources allocating far more than
necessary, or you may unknowingly under allocate, only to find out
once your application has been deployed into production, and it's
dropping everything on the floor.

Does anyone have thoughts on this? I took a look at virtio_rxtx and
head and I didn't see anything resembling my suggestion.

Comments would be appreciated. Thanks,

Kyle