[dpdk-dev] Mellanox ConnectX-5 crashes and mbuf leak

Martin Weiser martin.weiser at allegro-packets.com
Fri Oct 6 16:10:12 CEST 2017


Hi Yongseok,

unfortunately in a quick test using testpmd and ~20Gb/s of traffic with
your patch traffic forwarding always stops completely after a few seconds.

I wanted to test this with the current master of dpdk-next-net but after
"net/mlx5: support upstream rdma-core" it will not compile against
MLNX_OFED_LINUX-4.1-1.0.2.0.
So i used the last commit before that (v17.08-306-gf214841) and applied
your patch leading to the result described above.
Apart from your patch no other modifications were made and without the
patch testpmd forwards the traffic without a problem (in this
configuration mbufs should never run out so this test was never affected
by the original issue).

For this test I simply used testpmd with the following command line:
"testpmd -c 0xfe -- -i" and issued the "start" command. As traffic
generator I used t-rex with the sfr traffic profile.

Best regards,
Martin



On 05.10.17 23:46, Yongseok Koh wrote:
> Hi, Martin
>
> Thanks for your thorough and valuable reporting. We could reproduce it. I found
> a bug and fixed it. Please refer to the patch [1] I sent to the mailing list.
> This might not be automatically applicable to v17.08 as I rebased it on top of
> Nelio's flow cleanup patch. But as this is a simple patch, you can easily apply
> it manually.
>
> Thanks,
> Yongseok
>
> [1] http://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/29781
>
>> On Sep 26, 2017, at 2:23 AM, Martin Weiser <martin.weiser at allegro-packets.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> we are currently testing the Mellanox ConnectX-5 100G NIC with DPDK
>> 17.08 as well as dpdk-net-next and are
>> experiencing mbuf leaks as well as crashes (and in some instances even
>> kernel panics in a mlx5 module) under
>> certain load conditions.
>>
>> We initially saw these issues only in our own DPDK-based application and
>> it took some effort to reproduce this
>> in one of the DPDK example applications. However with the attached patch
>> to the load-balancer example we can
>> reproduce the issues reliably.
>>
>> The patch may look weird at first but I will explain why I made these
>> changes:
>>
>> * the sleep introduced in the worker threads simulates heavy processing
>> which causes the software rx rings to fill
>>   up under load. If the rings are large enough (I increased the ring
>> size with the load-balancer command line option
>>   as you can see in the example call further down) the mbuf pool may run
>> empty and I believe this leads to a malfunction
>>   in the mlx5 driver. As soon as this happens the NIC will stop
>> forwarding traffic, probably because the driver
>>   cannot allocate mbufs for the packets received by the NIC.
>> Unfortunately when this happens most of the mbufs will
>>   never return to the mbuf pool so that even when the traffic stops the
>> pool will remain almost empty and the
>>   application will not forward traffic even at a very low rate.
>>
>> * the use of the reference count in the mbuf in addition to the
>> situation described above is what makes the
>>   mlx5 DPDK driver crash almost immediately under load. In our
>> application we rely on this feature to be able to forward
>>   the packet quickly and still send the packet to a worker thread for
>> analysis and finally free the packet when analysis is
>>   done. Here I simulated this by increasing the mbuf reference count
>> immediately after receiving the mbuf from the
>>   driver and then calling rte_pktmbuf_free in the worker thread which
>> should only decrement the reference count again
>>   and not actually free the mbuf.
>>
>> We executed the patched load-balancer application with the following
>> command line:
>>
>>     ./build/load_balancer -l 3-7 -n 4 -- --rx "(0,0,3),(1,0,3)" --tx
>> "(0,3),(1,3)" --w "4" --lpm "16.0.0.0/8=>0; 48.0.0.0/8=>1;" --pos-lb 29
>> --rsz "1024, 32768, 1024, 1024"
>>
>> Then we generated traffic using the t-rex traffic generator and the sfr
>> test case. On our machine the issues start
>> to happen when the traffic exceeds ~6 Gbps but this may vary depending
>> on how powerful the test machine is (by
>> the way we were able to reproduce this on different types of hardware).
>>
>> A typical stacktrace looks like this:
>>
>>     Thread 1 "load_balancer" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
>>     0x0000000000614475 in _mm_storeu_si128 (__B=..., __P=<optimized
>> out>) at /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5/include/emmintrin.h:716
>>     716      __builtin_ia32_storedqu ((char *)__P, (__v16qi)__B);
>>     (gdb) bt
>>     #0  0x0000000000614475 in _mm_storeu_si128 (__B=..., __P=<optimized
>> out>) at /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5/include/emmintrin.h:716
>>     #1  rxq_cq_decompress_v (elts=0x7fff3732bef0, cq=0x7ffff7f99380,
>> rxq=0x7fff3732a980) at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_rxtx_vec_sse.c:679
>>     #2  rxq_burst_v (pkts_n=<optimized out>, pkts=0xa7c7b0 <app+432944>,
>> rxq=0x7fff3732a980) at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_rxtx_vec_sse.c:1242
>>     #3  mlx5_rx_burst_vec (dpdk_rxq=0x7fff3732a980, pkts=<optimized
>> out>, pkts_n=<optimized out>) at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_rxtx_vec_sse.c:1277
>>     #4  0x000000000043c11d in rte_eth_rx_burst (nb_pkts=3599,
>> rx_pkts=0xa7c7b0 <app+432944>, queue_id=0, port_id=0 '\000')
>>     at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net//x86_64-native-linuxapp-gcc/include/rte_ethdev.h:2781
>>     #5  app_lcore_io_rx (lp=lp at entry=0xa7c700 <app+432768>,
>> n_workers=n_workers at entry=1, bsz_rd=bsz_rd at entry=144,
>> bsz_wr=bsz_wr at entry=144, pos_lb=pos_lb at entry=29 '\035')
>>     at /root/dpdk-next-net/examples/load_balancer/runtime.c:198
>>     #6  0x0000000000447dc0 in app_lcore_main_loop_io () at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/examples/load_balancer/runtime.c:485
>>     #7  app_lcore_main_loop (arg=<optimized out>) at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/examples/load_balancer/runtime.c:669
>>     #8  0x0000000000495e8b in rte_eal_mp_remote_launch ()
>>     #9  0x0000000000441e0d in main (argc=<optimized out>,
>> argv=<optimized out>) at
>> /root/dpdk-next-net/examples/load_balancer/main.c:99
>>
>> The crash does not always happen at the exact same spot but in our tests
>> always in the same function.
>> In a few instances instead of an application crash the system froze
>> completely with what appeared to be a kernel
>> panic. The last output looked like a crash in the interrupt handler of a
>> mlx5 module but unfortunately I cannot
>> provide the exact output right now.
>>
>> All tests were performed under Ubuntu 16.04 server running a
>> 4.4.0-96-generic kernel and the lasted Mellanox OFED
>> MLNX_OFED_LINUX-4.1-1.0.2.0-ubuntu16.04-x86_64 was used.
>>
>> Any help with this issue is greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Martin
>>
>> <test.patch>



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