This commit, long overdue, contains contributions in the last 2 years
from Stefano Garzarella, Giuseppe Lettieri, Vincenzo Maffione, including:
+ fixes on monitor ports
+ the 'ptnet' virtual device driver, and ptnetmap backend, for
high speed virtual passthrough on VMs (bhyve fixes in an upcoming commit)
+ improved emulated netmap mode
+ more robust error handling
+ removal of stale code
+ various fixes to code and documentation (some mixup between RX and TX
parameters, and private and public variables)
We also include an additional tool, nmreplay, which is functionally
equivalent to tcpreplay but operating on netmap ports.
This commit contains large contributions from Giuseppe Lettieri and
Stefano Garzarella, is partly supported by grants from Verisign and Cisco,
and brings in the following:
- fix zerocopy monitor ports and introduce copying monitor ports
(the latter are lower performance but give access to all traffic
in parallel with the application)
- exclusive open mode, useful to implement solutions that recover
from crashes of the main netmap client (suggested by Patrick Kelsey)
- revised memory allocator in preparation for the 'passthrough mode'
(ptnetmap) recently presented at bsdcan. ptnetmap is described in
S. Garzarella, G. Lettieri, L. Rizzo;
Virtual device passthrough for high speed VM networking,
ACM/IEEE ANCS 2015, Oakland (CA) May 2015
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/research.html
- fix rx CRC handing on ixl
- add module dependencies for netmap when building drivers as modules
- minor simplifications to device-specific routines (*txsync, *rxsync)
- general code cleanup (remove unused variables, introduce macros
to access rings and remove duplicate code,
Applications do not need to be recompiled, unless of course
they want to use the new features (monitors and exclusive open).
Those willing to try this code on stable/10 can just update the
sys/dev/netmap/*, sys/net/netmap* with the version in HEAD
and apply the small patches to individual device drivers.
MFC after: 1 month
Sponsored by: (partly) Verisign, Cisco
Mostly bugfixes or features developed in the past 6 months,
so this is a 10.1 candidate.
Basically no user API changes (some bugfixes in sys/net/netmap_user.h).
In detail:
1. netmap support for virtio-net, including in netmap mode.
Under bhyve and with a netmap backend [2] we reach over 1Mpps
with standard APIs (e.g. libpcap), and 5-8 Mpps in netmap mode.
2. (kernel) add support for multiple memory allocators, so we can
better partition physical and virtual interfaces giving access
to separate users. The most visible effect is one additional
argument to the various kernel functions to compute buffer
addresses. All netmap-supported drivers are affected, but changes
are mechanical and trivial
3. (kernel) simplify the prototype for *txsync() and *rxsync()
driver methods. All netmap drivers affected, changes mostly mechanical.
4. add support for netmap-monitor ports. Think of it as a mirroring
port on a physical switch: a netmap monitor port replicates traffic
present on the main port. Restrictions apply. Drive carefully.
5. if_lem.c: support for various paravirtualization features,
experimental and disabled by default.
Most of these are described in our ANCS'13 paper [1].
Paravirtualized support in netmap mode is new, and beats the
numbers in the paper by a large factor (under qemu-kvm,
we measured gues-host throughput up to 10-12 Mpps).
A lot of refactoring and additional documentation in the files
in sys/dev/netmap, but apart from #2 and #3 above, almost nothing
of this stuff is visible to other kernel parts.
Example programs in tools/tools/netmap have been updated with bugfixes
and to support more of the existing features.
This is meant to go into 10.1 so we plan an MFC before the Aug.22 deadline.
A lot of this code has been contributed by my colleagues at UNIPI,
including Giuseppe Lettieri, Vincenzo Maffione, Stefano Garzarella.
MFC after: 3 days.
- netmap pipes, providing bidirectional blocking I/O while moving
100+ Mpps between processes using shared memory channels
(no mistake: over one hundred million. But mind you, i said
*moving* not *processing*);
- kqueue support (BHyVe needs it);
- improved user library. Just the interface name lets you select a NIC,
host port, VALE switch port, netmap pipe, and individual queues.
The upcoming netmap-enabled libpcap will use this feature.
- optional extra buffers associated to netmap ports, for applications
that need to buffer data yet don't want to make copies.
- segmentation offloading for the VALE switch, useful between VMs.
and a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.
My colleagues Giuseppe Lettieri and Vincenzo Maffione did a substantial
amount of work on these features so we owe them a big thanks.
There are some external repositories that can be of interest:
https://code.google.com/p/netmap
our public repository for netmap/VALE code, including
linux versions and other stuff that does not belong here,
such as python bindings.
https://code.google.com/p/netmap-libpcap
a clone of the libpcap repository with netmap support.
With this any libpcap client has access to most netmap
feature with no recompilation. E.g. tcpdump can filter
packets at 10-15 Mpps.
https://code.google.com/p/netmap-ipfw
a userspace version of ipfw+dummynet which uses netmap
to send/receive packets. Speed is up in the 7-10 Mpps
range per core for simple rulesets.
Both netmap-libpcap and netmap-ipfw will be merged upstream at some
point, but while this happens it is useful to have access to them.
And yes, this code will be merged soon. It is infinitely better
than the version currently in 10 and 9.
MFC after: 3 days
