| Message ID | cover.1689261692.git.petr.tesarik.ext@huawei.com (mailing list archive) |
|---|---|
| Headers | show |
| Series | Allow dynamic allocation of software IO TLB bounce buffers | expand |
Just to add a highlevel comment here after I feel like I need a little more time to review the guts. I'm still pretty concerned about the extra list that needs to be consulted in is_swiotlb_buffer, but I can't really think of anything better. Maybe an xarray has better cache characteristics, but that one requires even more allocations in the low-level dma map path. One thing I'd like to see for the next version is to make the new growing code a config option at least for now. It is a pretty big change of the existing swiotlb behavior, and I want people to opt into it conciously. Maybe we can drop the option again after a few years once everything has settled.
On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 08:52:16 +0200 Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote: > Just to add a highlevel comment here after I feel like I need a little > more time to review the guts. > > I'm still pretty concerned about the extra list that needs to be > consulted in is_swiotlb_buffer, but I can't really think of > anything better. Maybe an xarray has better cache characteristics, > but that one requires even more allocations in the low-level dma map > path. > > One thing I'd like to see for the next version is to make the > new growing code a config option at least for now. It is a pretty > big change of the existing swiotlb behavior, and I want people to opt > into it conciously. Maybe we can drop the option again after a few > years once everything has settled. Fine with me. I removed it after all my testing showed no performance impact as long as the size of the initial SWIOTLB is kept at the default value (and sufficient for the workload), but it's OK for me if dynamic SWIOTLB allocations are off by default. OTOH I'd like to make it a boot-time option rather than build-time option. Would that be OK for you? Petr T
On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 10:13:20AM +0200, Petr Tesařík wrote: > Fine with me. I removed it after all my testing showed no performance > impact as long as the size of the initial SWIOTLB is kept at the > default value (and sufficient for the workload), but it's OK for me if > dynamic SWIOTLB allocations are off by default. > > OTOH I'd like to make it a boot-time option rather than build-time > option. Would that be OK for you? I'd really like the config option to not even build the code. But a boot time option sounds very useful in addition to that.
From: Petr Tesarik <petr.tesarik.ext@huawei.com> Motivation ========== The software IO TLB was designed with these assumptions: 1) It would not be used much. Small systems (little RAM) don't need it, and big systems (lots of RAM) would have modern DMA controllers and an IOMMU chip to handle legacy devices. 2) A small fixed memory area (64 MiB by default) is sufficient to handle the few cases which require a bounce buffer. 3) 64 MiB is little enough that it has no impact on the rest of the system. 4) Bounce buffers require large contiguous chunks of low memory. Such memory is precious and can be allocated only early at boot. It turns out they are not always true: 1) Embedded systems may have more than 4GiB RAM but no IOMMU and legacy 32-bit peripheral busses and/or DMA controllers. 2) CoCo VMs use bounce buffers for all I/O but may need substantially more than 64 MiB. 3) Embedded developers put as many features as possible into the available memory. A few dozen "missing" megabytes may limit what features can be implemented. 4) If CMA is available, it can allocate large continuous chunks even after the system has run for some time. Goals ===== The goal of this work is to start with a small software IO TLB at boot and expand it later when/if needed. Design ====== This version of the patch series retains the current slot allocation algorithm with multiple areas to reduce lock contention, but additional slots can be added when necessary. These alternatives have been considered: - Allocate and free buffers as needed using direct DMA API. This works quite well, except in CoCo VMs where each allocation/free requires decrypting/encrypting memory, which is a very expensive operation. - Allocate a very large software IO TLB at boot, but allow to migrate pages to/from it (like CMA does). For systems with CMA, this would mean two big allocations at boot. Finding the balance between CMA, SWIOTLB and rest of available RAM can be challenging. More importantly, there is no clear benefit compared to allocating SWIOTLB memory pools from the CMA. Implementation Constraints ========================== These constraints have been taken into account: 1) Minimize impact on devices which do not benefit from the change. 2) Minimize the number of memory decryption/encryption operations. 3) Avoid contention on a lock or atomic variable to preserve parallel scalability. Additionally, the software IO TLB code is also used to implement restricted DMA pools. These pools are restricted to a pre-defined physical memory region and must not use any other memory. In other words, dynamic allocation of memory pools must be disabled for restricted DMA pools. Data Structures =============== The existing struct io_tlb_mem is the central type for a SWIOTLB allocator, but it now contains multiple memory pools:: io_tlb_mem +---------+ io_tlb_pool | SWIOTLB | +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |allocator|-->|default|-->|dynamic|-->|dynamic|-->... | | |memory | |memory | |memory | +---------+ | pool | | pool | | pool | +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ The allocator structure contains global state (such as flags and counters) and structures needed to schedule new allocations. Each memory pool contains the actual buffer slots and metadata. The first memory pool in the list is the default memory pool allocated statically at early boot. New memory pools are allocated from a kernel worker thread. That's because bounce buffers are allocated when mapping a DMA buffer, which may happen in interrupt context where large atomic allocations would probably fail. Allocation from process context is much more likely to succeed, especially if it can use CMA. Nonetheless, the onset of a load spike may fill up the SWIOTLB before the worker has a chance to run. In that case, try to allocate a small transient memory pool to accommodate the request. If memory is encrypted and the device cannot do DMA to encrypted memory, this buffer is allocated from the coherent atomic DMA memory pool. Reducing the size of SWIOTLB may therefore require increasing the size of the coherent pool with the "coherent_pool" command-line parameter. Performance =========== All testing compared a vanilla v6.4-rc6 kernel with a fully patched kernel. The kernel was booted with "swiotlb=force" to allow stress-testing the software IO TLB on a high-performance device that would otherwise not need it. CONFIG_DEBUG_FS was set to 'y' to match the configuration of popular distribution kernels; it is understood that parallel workloads suffer from contention on the recently added debugfs atomic counters. These benchmarks were run: - small: single-threaded I/O of 4 KiB blocks, - big: single-threaded I/O of 64 KiB blocks, - 4way: 4-way parallel I/O of 4 KiB blocks. In all tested cases, the default 64 MiB SWIOTLB would be sufficient (but wasteful). The "default" pair of columns shows performance impact when booted with 64 MiB SWIOTLB (i.e. current state). The "growing" pair of columns shows the impact when booted with a 1 MiB initial SWIOTLB, which grew to 5 MiB at run time. The "var" column in the tables below is the coefficient of variance over 5 runs of the test, the "diff" column is the difference in read-write I/O bandwidth (MiB/s). The very first column is the coefficient of variance in the results of the base unpatched kernel. First, on an x86 VM against a QEMU virtio SATA driver backed by a RAM-based block device on the host: base default growing var var diff var diff small 1.96% 0.47% -1.5% 0.52% -2.2% big 2.03% 1.35% +0.9% 2.22% +2.9% 4way 0.80% 0.45% -0.7% 1.22% <0.1% Second, on a Raspberry Pi4 with 8G RAM and a class 10 A1 microSD card: base default growing var var diff var diff small 1.09% 1.69% +0.5% 2.14% -0.2% big 0.03% 0.28% -0.5% 0.03% -0.1% 4way 5.15% 2.39% +0.2% 0.66% <0.1% Third, on a CoCo VM. This was a bigger system, so I also added a 24-thread parallel I/O test: base default growing var var diff var diff small 2.41% 6.02% +1.1% 10.33% +6.7% big 9.20% 2.81% -0.6% 16.84% -0.2% 4way 0.86% 2.66% -0.1% 2.22% -4.9% 24way 3.19% 6.19% +4.4% 4.08% -5.9% Note the increased variance of the CoCo VM, although the host was not otherwise loaded. These are caused by the first run, which includes the overhead of allocating additional bounce buffers and sharing them with the hypervisor. The system was not rebooted between successive runs. Parallel tests suffer from a reduced number of areas in the dynamically allocated memory pools. This can be improved by allocating a larger pool from CMA (not implemented in this series yet). I have no good explanation for the increase in performance of the 24-thread I/O test with the default (non-growing) memory pool. Although the difference is within variance, it seems to be real. The average bandwidth is consistently above that of the unpatched kernel. To sum it up: - All workloads benefit from reduced memory footprint. - No performance regressions have been observed with the default size of the software IO TLB. - Most workloads retain their former performance even if the software IO TLB grows at run time. Changelog ========= Changes from v3: - Provide swiotlb_is_allocated() instead of extending swiotlb_is_active(). - Do not grow SWIOTLB if its address has been queried (affects Octeon). - Do not grow SWIOTLB if a remap function is used (affects Xen PV). - Use dma_mask instead of coherent_dma_mask. - Replace complex ternary operators with if-else blocks. Changes from v2: - Complete rewrite using dynamically allocated memory pools rather than a list of individual buffers - Depend on other SWIOTLB fixes (already sent) - Fix Xen and MIPS Octeon builds Changes from RFC: - Track dynamic buffers per device instead of per swiotlb - Use a linked list instead of a maple tree - Move initialization of swiotlb fields of struct device to a helper function - Rename __lookup_dyn_slot() to lookup_dyn_slot_locked() - Introduce per-device flag if dynamic buffers are in use - Add one more user of DMA_ATTR_MAY_SLEEP - Add kernel-doc comments for new (and some old) code - Properly escape '*' in dma-attributes.rst Petr Tesarik (8): swiotlb: make io_tlb_default_mem local to swiotlb.c swiotlb: add documentation and rename swiotlb_do_find_slots() swiotlb: separate memory pool data from other allocator data swiotlb: add a flag whether a SWIOTLB is allowed to grow swiotlb: if swiotlb is full, fall back to a transient memory pool swiotlb: determine potential physical address limit swiotlb: allocate a new memory pool when existing pools are full swiotlb: search the software IO TLB only if a device makes use of it arch/arm/xen/mm.c | 2 +- arch/mips/pci/pci-octeon.c | 2 +- arch/x86/kernel/pci-dma.c | 2 +- drivers/base/core.c | 4 +- drivers/xen/swiotlb-xen.c | 2 +- include/linux/device.h | 8 +- include/linux/dma-mapping.h | 2 + include/linux/swiotlb.h | 111 +++++-- kernel/dma/direct.c | 2 +- kernel/dma/swiotlb.c | 605 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---- 10 files changed, 643 insertions(+), 97 deletions(-)