Re: [PATCH rdma-next 00/10] Enable relaxed ordering for ULPs
From: Tom Talpey
Date: Fri Apr 09 2021 - 10:26:35 EST
On 4/6/2021 7:49 AM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 11:42:31PM +0000, Chuck Lever III wrote:
We need to get a better idea what correctness testing has been done,
and whether positive correctness testing results can be replicated
on a variety of platforms.
RO has been rolling out slowly on mlx5 over a few years and storage
ULPs are the last to change. eg the mlx5 ethernet driver has had RO
turned on for a long time, userspace HPC applications have been using
it for a while now too.
I'd love to see RO be used more, it was always something the RDMA
specs supported and carefully architected for. My only concern is
that it's difficult to get right, especially when the platforms
have been running strictly-ordered for so long. The ULPs need
testing, and a lot of it.
We know there are platforms with broken RO implementations (like
Haswell) but the kernel is supposed to globally turn off RO on all
those cases. I'd be a bit surprised if we discover any more from this
series.
On the other hand there are platforms that get huge speed ups from
turning this on, AMD is one example, there are a bunch in the ARM
world too.
My belief is that the biggest risk is from situations where completions
are batched, and therefore polling is used to detect them without
interrupts (which explicitly). The RO pipeline will completely reorder
DMA writes, and consumers which infer ordering from memory contents may
break. This can even apply within the provider code, which may attempt
to poll WR and CQ structures, and be tripped up.
The Mellanox adapter, itself, historically has strict in-order DMA
semantics, and while it's great to relax that, changing it by default
for all consumers is something to consider very cautiously.
Still, obviously people should test on the platforms they have.
Yes, and "test" be taken seriously with focus on ULP data integrity.
Speedups will mean nothing if the data is ever damaged.
Tom.