[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] app/testpmd: adds mlockall() to fix pages

[Olivier MATZ]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 09:22:38AM +0200, Eelco Chaudron wrote:
> On 13/09/17 11:39, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > 12/09/2017 15:08, Eelco Chaudron:
> > > Call the mlockall() function, to attempt to lock all of its process
> > > memory into physical RAM, and preventing the kernel from paging any
> > > of its memory to disk.
> > > 
> > > When using testpmd for performance testing, depending on the code path
> > > taken, we see a couple of page faults in a row. These faults effect
> > > the overall drop-rate of testpmd. On Linux the mlockall() call will
> > > prefault all the pages of testpmd (and the DPDK libraries if linked
> > > dynamically), even without LD_BIND_NOW.
> > Does it work on FreeBSD?
> I do not have a FreeBSD setup, but from the documentation I've read the call
> is supported by FreeBSD.
> If some one has a working setup, please give this patch a quick try.
> > Is there any drawback?
> > Do we need to add an option for it?
> The only drawback I can think of is that with this change memory phyiscal
> memory is consumed as pages are pre-loaded.
> For testpmd (just loaded not doing anything) this is 2MB vs 35MB of memory
> used. I do not think this yields an extra option.

One small comment: the call to mlockall() will fail if we don't have
the permissions. I guess it's not an issue, but I wonder if we should
log it?

Olivier