Re: [RFC PATCH]vhost-blk: In-kernel accelerator for virtio blockdevice

From: Badari Pulavarty
Date: Fri Jul 29 2011 - 14:12:36 EST


Hi Liu Yuan,

I am glad to see that you started looking at vhost-blk. I did an attempt year ago to improve block
performance using vhost-blk approach.

http://lwn.net/Articles/379864/
http://lwn.net/Articles/382543/

I will take a closer look at your patchset to find differences and similarities.

- I focused on using vfs interfaces in the kernel, so that I can use it for file-backed devices.
Our use-case scenario is mostly file-backed images.

- In few cases, virtio-blk did outperform vhost-blk -- which was counter intuitive - but
couldn't exactly nail down. why ?

- I had to implement my own threads for parellism. I see that you are using aio infrastructure
to get around it.

- In our high scale performance testing, what we found is block-backed device performance is
pretty close to bare-metal (91% of bare-metal). vhost-blk didn't add any major benefits to it.
I am curious on your performance analysis & data on where you see the gains and why ?

Hence I prioritized my work low :(

Now that you are interested in driving this, I am happy to work with you and see what
vhost-blk brings to the tables. (even if helps us improve virtio-blk).

Thanks,
Badari


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