[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v3 0/5] vhost: optimize enqueue

[Maxime Coquelin]

On 08/22/2016 10:11 AM, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
> Hi Zhihong,
>
> On 08/19/2016 07:43 AM, Zhihong Wang wrote:
> > This patch set optimizes the vhost enqueue function.
> >
> > It implements the vhost logic from scratch into a single function
> > designed
> > for high performance and good maintainability, and improves CPU
> > efficiency
> > significantly by optimizing cache access, which means:
> >
> >  *  For fast frontends (eg. DPDK virtio pmd), higher performance (maximum
> >     throughput) can be achieved.
> >
> >  *  For slow frontends (eg. kernel virtio-net), better scalability can be
> >     achieved, each vhost core can support more connections since it takes
> >     less cycles to handle each single frontend.
> >
> > The main optimization techniques are:
> >
> >  1. Reorder code to reduce CPU pipeline stall cycles.
> >
> >  2. Batch update the used ring for better efficiency.
> >
> >  3. Prefetch descriptor to hide cache latency.
> >
> >  4. Remove useless volatile attribute to allow compiler optimization.
>
> Thanks for these details, this is helpful to understand where the perf
> gain comes from.
> I would suggest to add these information as comments in the code
> where/if it makes sense. If more a general comment, at least add it in
> the commit message of the patch introducing it.
> Indeed, adding it to the cover letter is fine, but the information is
> lost as soon as the series is applied.
>
> You don't mention any figures, so I set up a benchmark on my side to
> evaluate your series. It indeed shows an interesting performance gain.
>
> My setup consists of one host running a guest.
> The guest generates as much 64bytes packets as possible using
> pktgen-dpdk. The hosts forwards received packets back to the guest
> using testpmd on vhost pmd interface. Guest's vCPUs are pinned to
> physical CPUs.
>
> I tested it with and without your v1 patch, with and without
> rx-mergeable feature turned ON.
> Results are the average of 8 runs of 60 seconds:
>
> Rx-Mergeable ON : 7.72Mpps
> Rx-Mergeable ON + "vhost: optimize enqueue" v1: 9.19Mpps
> Rx-Mergeable OFF: 10.52Mpps
> Rx-Mergeable OFF + "vhost: optimize enqueue" v1: 10.60Mpps
>
I forgot to add that before this series, I think we should first fix the windows bug.
Else we will need a dedicated fix for the stable branch.

Regards,
Maxime