Re: [RFC] avoid indirect calls for DMA direct mappings

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2018 02:21:42 +0100
Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 08:24:38PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:
> > On 06/12/2018 20:00, Christoph Hellwig wrote:  
> >> On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 06:54:17PM +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:  
> >>> I'm pretty sure we used to assign dummy_dma_ops explicitly to devices at
> >>> the point we detected the ACPI properties are wrong - that shouldn't be too
> >>> much of a headache to go back to.  
> >>
> >> Ok.  I've cooked up a patch to use NULL as the go direct marker.
> >> This cleans up a few things nicely, but also means we now need to
> >> do the bypass scheme for all ops, not just the fast path.  But we
> >> probably should just move the slow path ops out of line anyway,
> >> so I'm not worried about it.  This has survived some very basic
> >> testing on x86, and really needs to be cleaned up and split into
> >> multiple patches..  
> >
> > I've also just finished hacking something up to keep the arm64 status quo - 
> > I'll need to actually test it tomorrow, but the overall diff looks like the 
> > below.  
> 
> Nice.  I created a branch that picked up your bits and also the ideas
> from Linus, and the result looks reall nice.  I'll still need a signoff
> for your bits, though.
> 
> Jesper, can you give this a spin if it changes the number even further?
> 
>   git://git.infradead.org/users/hch/misc.git dma-direct-calls.2
> 
>   http://git.infradead.org/users/hch/misc.git/shortlog/refs/heads/dma-direct-calls.2

I'll test it soon...

I looked at my perf stat recording on my existing tests[1] and there
seems to be significantly more I-cache usage.

Copy-paste from my summary[1]:
 [1] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-project/blob/master/areas/dma/dma01_test_hellwig_direct_dma.org#summary-of-results

* Summary of results

Using XDP_REDIRECT between drivers RX ixgbe(10G) redirect TX i40e(40G),
via BPF devmap (used samples/bpf/xdp_redirect_map) . (Note choose
higher TX link-speed to assure that we don't to have a TX bottleneck).
The baseline-kernel is at commit https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/ef78e5ec9214,
which is commit just before Hellwigs changes in this tree.

Performance numbers in packets/sec (XDP_REDIRECT ixgbe -> i40e):
 - 11913154 (11,913,154) pps - baseline compiled without retpoline
 -  7438283  (7,438,283) pps - regression due to CONFIG_RETPOLINE
 -  9610088  (9,610,088) pps - mitigation via Hellwig dma-direct-calls

From the inst per cycle, it is clear that retpolines are stalling the CPU
pipeline:

| pps        | insn per cycle |
|------------+----------------|
| 11,913,154 |           2.39 |
| 7,438,283  |           1.54 |
| 9,610,088  |           2.04 |


Strangely the Instruction-Cache is also under heavier pressure:

| pps        | l2_rqsts.all_code_rd | l2_rqsts.code_rd_hit | l2_rqsts.code_rd_miss |
|------------+----------------------+----------------------+-----------------------|
| 11,913,154 | 874,547              | 742,335              | 132,198               |
| 7,438,283  | 649,513              | 547,581              | 101,945               |
| 9,610,088  | 2,568,064            | 2,001,369            | 566,683               |
|            |                      |                      |                       |


-- 
Best regards,
  Jesper Dangaard Brouer
  MSc.CS, Principal Kernel Engineer at Red Hat
  LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brouer