> 
> Hi Ciara,
> 
> > Thanks for your feedback. The limitation is only placed on phy port queues
> on the VP (vhost -> phy) path. VV path and PV path are not
> > affected.
> 
> Yes, you are right. VM to VM traffic is copied on transmit to the second VM.
> 
> > > I would much rather put a requirement on tenants that their virtio drivers
> > > need to allocate enough virtio packet buffers if they want their VM to use
> > > zero-copy vhostuser ports. Or is the critical resource  owned and
> managed by
> > > Qemu and we'd need a patch on Qemu to overcome this limit?
> 
> Can you comment on that? Can a user also reduce the problem by
> configuring
> a) a larger virtio Tx queue size (up to 1K) in Qemu, or

Is this possible right now without modifying QEMU src? I think the size is 
hardcoded to 256 at the moment although it may become configurable in the 
future. If/when it does, we can test and update the docs if it does solve the 
problem. I don’t think we should suggest modifying the QEMU src as a workaround 
now.

> b) a larger mempool for packets in Tx direction inside the guest (driver?)

Using the DPDK driver in the guest & generating traffic via testpmd I modified 
the number of descriptors given to the virtio device from 512 (default) to 2048 
& 4096 but it didn't resolve the issue unfortunately.

> 
> > >
> > > And what about increased packet drop risk due to shortened tx queues?
> >
> > I guess this could be an issue. If I had some data to back this up I would
> include it in the documentation and mention the risk.
> > If the risk is unacceptable to the user they may choose to not enable the
> feature. It's disabled by default so shouldn't introduce an issue for
> > the standard case.
> 
> Yes, but it would be good to understand the potential drawback for a better
> judgement of the trade-off between better raw throughput and higher loss
> risk.

I ran RFC2544 0% packet loss tests for ZC on & off (64B PVP) and observed the 
following:

Max rate (Mpps) with 0% loss
ZC Off 2599518
ZC On  1678758

As you suspected, there is a trade-off. I can mention this in the docs.

Thanks,
Ciara

> 
> Regards, Jan
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