Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Developer Summit Storage Performance BoF notes

[Felipe Franciosi <felipe.franciosi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for writing this up, David.

I also did not take any notes (argh), but from what I recall your summary is 
complete.

Do we want to raise any actions on who will follow each of the items?
Or at least prioritise them?

Thanks,
Felipe

-----Original Message-----
From: xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
On Behalf Of David Vrabel
Sent: 30 October 2013 11:04
To: Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-devel] Xen Developer Summit Storage Performance BoF notes

[ I forgot to make notes so these are from memory, please respond with any 
corrections or omissions. ]

Felipe introduced the session, highlighting the change in storage (i.e., low 
latency SSDs and fast SANs) were exposing bottlenecks in the current 
architecture which is designed with slow disks.  Refer to his presentation from 
Friday for more details.

Felipe noted that persistent grants were causing performance regressions when 
the backend did not support them and system where copy cost > map cost (e.g., 
when dom0 has few VCPUs).  Roger agreed on restoring the zero-copy path in the 
frontends was a good idea. [He has now posted patches for this.]

Felipe mentioned that persistent grants were most beneficial when using user 
space backend.  David pointed out that this is most likely caused by a poor 
implementation of the gntdev device.

Matt mentioned contention on the m2p override lock as causing performance 
problems and suggested making this a read/write lock.

David listed some of the key bottlenecks already identified and plans to 
resolve them without any protocol changes.

1. Unmap TLB flushes can be eliminated if the mapping is not used.
Experiments by XenServer suggest grant mapped pages by blkback are never 
accessed thus eliminating all TLB flushes.

2. Grant table lock contention can be reduced by finer grained locked.
e.g., by having buckets of map tracking structures and hashing
domid+grant ref to a bucket.

3. gntdev device does a double map/unmap (for userspace and kernel
mapping) and does the kernel mapping a page at a time.  Userspace mappings 
could be done at page fault time (in the expectation that userspace doesn't 
touch them) and the kernel side should batch grant table ops using a new 
GNTOP_unmap_and_duplicate hypercall sub-op for the unmap.  Roger said he'd 
posted patch for the sub-op, but received no feedback.

Anil mentioned PV filesystems but this wasn't discussed in any depth.

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