Hi Julian, I'll let Neel take care of the time questions.
3. Even moderate guest disk I/O completely kills guest network performance. For example, whenever security(8) (security(7) in FreeBSD) runs, guest network throughput drops from 150+ Mbps to ~20 Mbps, and jitter from ping jumps from <0.01 ms to 100+ ms. If I try to build something in the guest, then network becomes almost unusable. The network performance degradation only affects the guest that's generating the I/O; high I/O on guest B doesn't affect guest A, nor would high I/O on the host. I'm using both virtio-blk and virio-net drivers, and the guests' disk images are backed by zvol+geli. Removing geli has no effect. There are some commits in CURRENT that suggests improved virtio performance, but I'm not comfortable running CURRENT. Is there a workaround I could use for 10.1?
In 10.1, virtio-blk i/o is done sychronously in the context of the guest vCPU exit. If it's a single vCPU guest, or the virtio-net interrupt happens to be delivered to that vCPU, performance will suffer.
A workaround is to use ahci-hd for the disk emulation and not virtio-blk. The AHCI emulation does i/o in a dedicated thread and doesn't block the vCPU thread.
4. virtio-blk always reports the virtual disk as having 512-byte sectors, and so I get I/O errors on OpenBSD guests when the disk image is backed by zvol+geli with 4K sector size. Curiously, this only seems to affect zvol+geli; with just zvol it seems to work. Also, it works either way on Linux guests. ATM I changed the zvol / geli sector size to 512 bytes, which probably made #2 worse. I think this bug / feature is addressed by: <https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/02e846756ee99b849987a9bb6f57566fc70360c7>, but again is there a workaround to force a specific sector size for 10.1?
The only workaround for 10.1 would be to use ahci-hd instead of virtio-blk. The correct sector size will be reported there.
5. This may be better directed at OpenBSD but I'll ask here anyway: if I enable virtio-rnd then OpenBSD would not boot with "couldn't map interrupt" error. The kernel in bsd.rd will boot, but not the installed kernel (or the one built from STABLE; I forgot). Again, Linux seems unaffected, but I couldn't tell if it's actually working.
Try using the -W option to bhyve. This will force the bhyve virtio code to advertize (non-standard) MSI interrupt capability which OpenBSD will then use to allocate vectors.
later, Peter. _______________________________________________ freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualization To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-virtualization-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
