Re: [PATCH 0/1] vhost: add vhost_blk driver

From: Maxim Levitsky
Date: Mon Nov 05 2018 - 06:55:34 EST


On Sun, 2018-11-04 at 11:40 -0500, Vitaly Mayatskih wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 6:57 AM Maxim Levitsky <mlevitsk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> > I am also working in this area, and so I am very intersted in this driver.
> >
> > > 1 171k 151k 148k 151k 195k 187k 175k
> >
> > If I understand correctly this is fio --numjobs=1?
> > It looks like you are getting better that native performance over bare metal
> > in
> > E,F,G (vhost-blk cases in fact). Is this correct?
>
> Yes. At such speeds it is a matter of how the workers are scheduled,
> i.e. how good is batching. There are other factors why vhost-blk is on
> par or slightly higher than fio running in userspace on bare metal,
> but from my observation the right batching all through the stack is
> more important.

I completely agree with you on that.
I currently learning profiling/tracing to understand the batching (or lack of)
in the tests I run

My focus currently is mostly on spdk + native nvme
While for multiple threads, the performance is very close to bare metal, on
single thread I see significant overhead which probably relate to batching as
well.

>
> > Could you share the full fio command line you have used?
>
> sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=8300; numactl -p 1 -N 1 ./qemu-system-x86_64
> -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 16 -mem-prealloc -mem-path
> /dev/hugepages/foo -m 8G -nographic -drive
> if=none,id=drive0,format=raw,file=/dev/mapper/mirror-hello,cache=none
> -device virtio-blk-pci,id=blk0,drive=drive0,num-queues=16 -drive
> if=none,id=drive1,format=raw,file=/dev/mapper/mirror-volume,cache=none
> -device vhost-blk-pci,id=blk1,drive=drive1,num-queues=16
Thanks!

>
> for i in `seq 1 16`; do echo -n "$i "; ./fio --direct=1 --rw=randread
> --ioengine=libaio --bs=4k --iodepth=128 --numjobs=$i --name=foo
> --time_based --runtime=15 --group_reporting --filename=/dev/vda
> --size=10g | grep -Po 'IOPS=[0-9\.]*k'; done
>
> > Which IO device did you use for the test? NVME?
>
> That was LVM mirror over 2 network disks. On the target side it was
> LVM stripe over few NVMe's.
Have you tried to test this over directly connected NVME device to?
The networking might naturally improve batching I think.

>
> > Which system (cpu model/number of cores/etc) did you test on?
>
> Dual socket: "model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6142 CPU @
> 2.60GHz" with HT enabled, so 64 logical cores in total. The network
> was something from Intel with 53 Gbps PHY and served by fm10k driver.


All right, thanks!
I'll test your driver on my system where I tested most of the current solutions.

Best regards,
Maxim Levitsky