xen/blkback: Persistent grant maps for xen blk drivers
This patch implements persistent grants for the xen-blk{front,back} mechanism. The effect of this change is to reduce the number of unmap operations performed, since they cause a (costly) TLB shootdown. This allows the I/O performance to scale better when a large number of VMs are performing I/O. Previously, the blkfront driver was supplied a bvec[] from the request queue. This was granted to dom0; dom0 performed the I/O and wrote directly into the grant-mapped memory and unmapped it; blkfront then removed foreign access for that grant. The cost of unmapping scales badly with the number of CPUs in Dom0. An experiment showed that when Dom0 has 24 VCPUs, and guests are performing parallel I/O to a ramdisk, the IPIs from performing unmap's is a bottleneck at 5 guests (at which point 650,000 IOPS are being performed in total). If more than 5 guests are used, the performance declines. By 10 guests, only 400,000 IOPS are being performed. This patch improves performance by only unmapping when the connection between blkfront and back is broken. On startup blkfront notifies blkback that it is using persistent grants, and blkback will do the same. If blkback is not capable of persistent mapping, blkfront will still use the same grants, since it is compatible with the previous protocol, and simplifies the code complexity in blkfront. To perform a read, in persistent mode, blkfront uses a separate pool of pages that it maps to dom0. When a request comes in, blkfront transmutes the request so that blkback will write into one of these free pages. Blkback keeps note of which grefs it has already mapped. When a new ring request comes to blkback, it looks to see if it has already mapped that page. If so, it will not map it again. If the page hasn't been previously mapped, it is mapped now, and a record is kept of this mapping. Blkback proceeds as usual. When blkfront is notified that blkback has completed a request, it memcpy's from the shared memory, into the bvec supplied. A record that the {gref, page} tuple is mapped, and not inflight is kept. Writes are similar, except that the memcpy is peformed from the supplied bvecs, into the shared pages, before the request is put onto the ring. Blkback stores a mapping of grefs=>{page mapped to by gref} in a red-black tree. As the grefs are not known apriori, and provide no guarantees on their ordering, we have to perform a search through this tree to find the page, for every gref we receive. This operation takes O(log n) time in the worst case. In blkfront grants are stored using a single linked list. The maximum number of grants that blkback will persistenly map is currently set to RING_SIZE * BLKIF_MAX_SEGMENTS_PER_REQUEST, to prevent a malicios guest from attempting a DoS, by supplying fresh grefs, causing the Dom0 kernel to map excessively. If a guest is using persistent grants and exceeds the maximum number of grants to map persistenly the newly passed grefs will be mapped and unmaped. Using this approach, we can have requests that mix persistent and non-persistent grants, and we need to handle them correctly. This allows us to set the maximum number of persistent grants to a lower value than RING_SIZE * BLKIF_MAX_SEGMENTS_PER_REQUEST, although setting it will lead to unpredictable performance. In writing this patch, the question arrises as to if the additional cost of performing memcpys in the guest (to/from the pool of granted pages) outweigh the gains of not performing TLB shootdowns. The answer to that question is `no'. There appears to be very little, if any additional cost to the guest of using persistent grants. There is perhaps a small saving, from the reduced number of hypercalls performed in granting, and ending foreign access. Signed-off-by: Oliver Chick <oliver.chick@citrix.com> Signed-off-by: Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau@citrix.com> Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com> [v1: Fixed up the misuse of bool as int]
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