On 12/15/2017 12:32 PM, Jan Scheurich wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>>>> What if we have 2, 4, 10 HW NICs and a few different destinations for 
>>>> traffic from VM?
>>>> What if we have 2, 4, 10 HW NICs added to balanced OVS bonding and just a 
>>>> few different packet flows?
>>>> What if we have HW NICs with small number of TX queues (like VFs) and XPS 
>>>> is working?
>>>> We may actually stuck with non-working virtual interface in all above 
>>>> cases.
>>>>
>>>> IMHO, this feature should be marked as experimental until we don't have 
>>>> proper solution
>>>> for that stuck mbufs in HW rings.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?
> 
> I definitely think this feature, if merged, should be declared experimental. 
> As far as I can see there is no safe way to prevent vhostuser ports running 
> out of descriptors and the negative impact on packet drop likelihood is so 
> significant that it may not justify the small increase in saturation load.
> 
>>>>
>>>
>>> How about using rte_eth_tx_done_cleanup() ?
>>
>> This API currently implemented only by igb driver.
>> This will not be much useful.
>>
>>> I guess a user would not
>>> want to combine this feature with sw tx batching though.
> 
> Yes, tx batching with tx-flush-timer > 0 would not go well at all with 
> zero-copy.
> We need to document that conflict in the final version.
> 
>>>
>>> On a related note, I would like to ask Ciara/Jan the use case when this
>>> feature would likely be enabled. The RFC2544 test is very opaque but it
>>> seems there is at least some increased packet loss, so would it be just
>>> when the user knows it is vm-vm and large packets? (In which case you
>>> could argue, packets would not get stuck in HW NIC anyway)
> 
> Given the current limitations I don't think zero-copy vhostuser is a viable 
> option for Cloud  deployments, where the bulk of the traffic is of type PVP.  
> 
> The VM-VM traffic case is unproblematic, but the issue I have is that at 
> configuration time of the vhostuser port, the operator would have to make 
> assumptions on whether the traffic remains local on the host or goes out to 
> the physical network. But that depends on scheduling decisions by Nova, that 
> the operator would typically not know in advance.
> 
> All in all, I have no objections against merging zero copy as experimental 
> feature, but from our perspective there is more value in the Tx batching 
> patch series.
> 

+1

Thanks Jan.

> BR, Jan
> 

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