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
was granted via rings and ni_bufs_list_head represented in those rings
and lists (e.g., via SIGKILL), those buffers are no longer available
for subsequent users for the lifetime of the system. To mitigate this
resource leak, reset the allocator state when the last ref to that
allocator is released.
Note that this only recovers leaked resources for an allocator when
there are no longer any users of that allocator, so there remain
circumstances in which leaked allocator resources may not ever be
recovered - consider a set of multiple netmap processes that are all
using the same allocator (say, the global allocator) where members of
that set may be killed and restarted over time but at any given point
there is one member of that set running.
Based on intial work by adrian@.
Reviewed by: Giuseppe Lettieri (g.lettieri@iet.unipi.it), luigi
Approved by: jmallett (mentor)
MFC after: 1 week
Sponsored by: Norse Corp, Inc.
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
Most relevant features:
- netmap emulation on any NIC, even those without native netmap support.
On the ixgbe we have measured about 4Mpps/core/queue in this mode,
which is still a lot more than with sockets/bpf.
- seamless interconnection of VALE switch, NICs and host stack.
If you disable accelerations on your NIC (say em0)
ifconfig em0 -txcsum -txcsum
you can use the VALE switch to connect the NIC and the host stack:
vale-ctl -h valeXX:em0
allowing sharing the NIC with other netmap clients.
- THE USER API HAS SLIGHTLY CHANGED (head/cur/tail pointers
instead of pointers/count as before). This was unavoidable to support,
in the future, multiple threads operating on the same rings.
Netmap clients require very small source code changes to compile again.
On the plus side, the new API should be easier to understand
and the internals are a lot simpler.
The manual page has been updated extensively to reflect the current
features and give some examples.
This is the result of work of several people including Giuseppe Lettieri,
Vincenzo Maffione, Michio Honda and myself, and has been financially
supported by EU projects CHANGE and OPENLAB, from NetApp University
Research Fund, NEC, and of course the Universita` di Pisa.
This includes the following:
- use separate memory regions for VALE ports
- locking fixes
- some simplifications in the NIC-specific routines
- performance improvements for the VALE switch
- some new features in the pkt-gen test program
- documentation updates
There are small API changes that require programs to be recompiled
(NETMAP_API has been bumped so you will detect old binaries at runtime).
In particular:
- struct netmap_slot now is 16 bytes to support an extra pointer,
which may save one data copy when using VALE ports or VMs;
- the struct netmap_if has two extra fields;
MFC after: 3 days
that revises the netmap memory allocator so that the
various parameters (number and size of buffers, rings, descriptors)
can be modified at runtime through sysctl variables.
The changes become effective when no netmap clients are active.
The API is mostly unchanged, although the NIOCUNREGIF ioctl now
does not bring the interface back to normal mode: and you
need to close the file descriptor for that.
This change was necessary to track who is using the mapped region,
and since it is a simplification of the API there was no
incentive in trying to preserve NIOCUNREGIF.
We will remove the ioctl from the kernel next time we need
a real API change (and version bump).
Among other things, buffer allocation when opening devices is
now much faster: it used to take O(N^2) time, now it is linear.
Submitted by: Giuseppe Lettieri
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/
VALE lets you dynamically instantiate multiple software bridges
that talk the netmap API (and are *extremely* fast), so you can test
netmap applications without the need for high end hardware.
This is particularly useful as I am completing a netmap-aware
version of ipfw, and VALE provides an excellent testing platform.
Also, I also have netmap backends for qemu mostly ready for commit
to the port, and this too will let you interconnect virtual machines
at high speed without fiddling with bridges, tap or other slow solutions.
The API for applications is unchanged, so you can use the code
in tools/tools/netmap (which i will update soon) on the VALE ports.
This commit also syncs the code with the one in my internal repository,
so you will see some conditional code for other platforms.
The code should run mostly unmodified on stable/9 so people interested
in trying it can just copy sys/dev/netmap/ and sys/net/netmap*.h
from HEAD
VALE is joint work with my colleague Giuseppe Lettieri, and
is partly supported by the EU Projects CHANGE and OPENLAB