Virtualization - Jan 2022 - [PATCH v1] vhost: cache avail index in vhost_enable_notify()

On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 07:45:35AM -0500, Michael S. Tsirkin
wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 10:05:08AM +0100, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
>> In vhost_enable_notify() we enable the notifications and we read
>> the avail index to check if new buffers have become available in
>> the meantime.
>>
>> We are not caching the avail index, so when the device will call
>> vhost_get_vq_desc(), it will find the old value in the cache and
>> it will read the avail index again.
>>
>> It would be better to refresh the cache every time we read avail
>> index, so let's change vhost_enable_notify() caching the value in
>> `avail_idx` and compare it with `last_avail_idx` to check if there
>> are new buffers available.
>>
>> Anyway, we don't expect a significant performance boost because
>> the above path is not very common, indeed vhost_enable_notify()
>> is often called with unlikely(), expecting that avail index has
>> not been updated.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Stefano Garzarella <sgarzare at redhat.com>
>
>... and can in theory even hurt due to an extra memory write.
>So ... performance test restults pls?
Right, could be.

I'll run some perf test with vsock, about net, do you have a test suite 
or common step to follow to test it?

Thanks,
Stefano

On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 02:38:16PM +0100, Stefano Garzarella
wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 07:45:35AM -0500, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 10:05:08AM +0100, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
> > > In vhost_enable_notify() we enable the notifications and we read
> > > the avail index to check if new buffers have become available in
> > > the meantime.
> > > 
> > > We are not caching the avail index, so when the device will call
> > > vhost_get_vq_desc(), it will find the old value in the cache and
> > > it will read the avail index again.
> > > 
> > > It would be better to refresh the cache every time we read avail
> > > index, so let's change vhost_enable_notify() caching the
value in
> > > `avail_idx` and compare it with `last_avail_idx` to check if
there
> > > are new buffers available.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, we don't expect a significant performance boost
because
> > > the above path is not very common, indeed vhost_enable_notify()
> > > is often called with unlikely(), expecting that avail index has
> > > not been updated.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Stefano Garzarella <sgarzare at redhat.com>
> > 
> > ... and can in theory even hurt due to an extra memory write.
> > So ... performance test restults pls?
> 
> Right, could be.
> 
> I'll run some perf test with vsock, about net, do you have a test suite
or
> common step to follow to test it?
> 
> Thanks,
> Stefano
You can use the vhost test as a unit test as well.

-- 
MST