Re: vhost-blk development

[Michael Baysek <mbaysek@liquidweb.com>]

Hi Yuan, 

Can you point me to the latest revision of the code and provide some 
guidance on how to test it?  I really would love to see if it helps.

Best,
-Mike


----- Original Message -----
From: "Liu Yuan" <namei.unix@gmail.com>
To: "Michael Baysek" <mbaysek@liquidweb.com>
Cc: "Stefan Hajnoczi" <stefanha@gmail.com>, kvm@vger.kernel.org
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 10:38:39 PM
Subject: Re: vhost-blk development

On 04/12/2012 12:52 AM, Michael Baysek wrote:

> In this particular case, I did intend to deploy these instances directly to 
> the ramdisk.  I want to squeeze every drop of performance out of these 
> instances for use cases with lots of concurrent accesses.   I thought it 
> would be possible to achieve improvements an order of magnitude or more 
> over SSD, but it seems not to be the case (so far).  


Last year I tried virtio-blk over vhost, which originally planned to put
virtio-blk driver into kernel to reduce system call overhead and shorten
the code path.

I think in your particular case (ramdisk), virtio-blk will hit the best
performance improvement because biggest time-hogger IO is ripped out in
the path, at least would be expected much better than my last test
numbers (+15% for throughput and -10% for latency) which runs on local disk.

But unfortunately, virtio-blk was not considered to be useful enough at
that time, Qemu folks think it is better to optimize the IO stack in
QEMU instead of setting up another code path for it.

I remember that I developed virtio-blk at Linux 3.0 base, So I think it
is not hard to rebase it on latest kernel code or porting it back to
RHEL 6's modified 2.6.32 kernel.

Thanks,
Yuan