Re: [RFC PATCH 27/28] sunrpc: Use sendmsg(MSG_SPLICE_PAGES) rather then sendpage

[Chuck Lever III]

> On Mar 16, 2023, at 1:28 PM, David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Chuck Lever III <chuck.lever@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> That means I haven't seen the cover letter and do not have any
>> context for this proposed change.
> 
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20230316152618.711970-1-dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx/
> 
>> We've tried combining the sendpages calls in here before. It
>> results in a significant and measurable performance regression.
>> See:
>> 
>> da1661b93bf4 ("SUNRPC: Teach server to use xprt_sock_sendmsg for socket sends")
> 
> The commit replaced the use of sendpage with sendmsg, but that took away the
> zerocopy aspect of sendpage.  The idea behind MSG_SPLICE_PAGES is that it
> allows you to do keep that.  I'll have to try reapplying this commit and
> adding the MSG_SPLICE_PAGES flag.

Note that, as Trond point out, NFSD can handle an NFS READ
request with either a splice actor or by copying through a
vector, depending on what the underlying filesystem can
support and whether we are using a security flavor that
requires stable pages. Grep for RQ_SPLICE_OK.

Eventually we want to make use of iomaps to ensure that
reading areas of a file that are not allocated on disk
does not trigger an extent allocation. Anna is working on
that, but I have no idea what it will look like. We can
talk more at LSF, if you'll both be around.

Also... I find I have to put back the use of MSG_MORE and
friends in here, otherwise kTLS will split each of these
kernel_sendsomething() calls into its own TLS record. This
code is likely going to look different after support for
RPC-with-TLS goes in.


>> Therefore, this kind of change needs to be accompanied by both
>> benchmark results and some field testing to convince me it won't
>> cause harm.
> 
> Yep.
> 
>> And, we have to make certain that this doesn't break operation
>> with kTLS sockets... do they support MSG_SPLICE_PAGES ?
> 
> I haven't yet tackled AF_TLS, AF_KCM or AF_SMC as they seem significantly more
> complex than TCP and UDP.  I thought I'd get some feedback on what I have
> before I tried my hand at those.

OK, I didn't mean AF_TLS, I meant the stuff under net/tls,
which is AF_INET[6] and TCP, but with a ULP in place. It's
got its own sendpage and sendmsg methods that choke when
an unrecognized MSG_ flag is present.

But OK, you're just asking for feedback, so I'll put my red
pencil down.


--
Chuck Lever