Re: [PATCH] block: virtio_blk: don't hold spin lock during world switch

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Thu May 29 2014 - 23:19:23 EST


On 2014-05-29 20:49, Ming Lei wrote:
Firstly, it isn't necessary to hold lock of vblk->vq_lock
when notifying hypervisor about queued I/O.

Secondly, virtqueue_notify() will cause world switch and
it may take long time on some hypervisors(such as, qemu-arm),
so it isn't good to hold the lock and block other vCPUs.

On arm64 quad core VM(qemu-kvm), the patch can increase I/O
performance a lot with VIRTIO_RING_F_EVENT_IDX enabled:
- without the patch: 14K IOPS
- with the patch: 34K IOPS

Patch looks good to me. I don't see a hit on my qemu-kvm testing, but it definitely makes sense and I can see it hurting in other places.

--
Jens Axboe

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