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
and make it easier to replace it with a different implementation.
On passing, also fix indentation.
NOTE: I know that #include "foo.c" is ugly, but the alternative
(add another entry to sys/conf/files, add a separate header with
structs and prototypes, and expose functions that are meant to
be private) looks even worse to me.
We need a more modular way to specify dependencies and build options.
USERSPACE:
1. add support for devices with different number of rx and tx queues;
2. add better support for zero-copy operation, adding an extra field
to the netmap ring to indicate how many buffers we have already processed
but not yet released (with help from Eddie Kohler);
3. The two changes above unfortunately require an API change, so while
at it add a version field and some spares to the ioctl() argument
to help detect mismatches.
4. update the manual page for the two changes above;
5. update sample applications in tools/tools/netmap
KERNEL:
1. simplify the internal structures moving the global wait queues
to the 'struct netmap_adapter';
2. simplify the functions that map kring<->nic ring indexes
3. normalize device-specific code, helps mainteinance;
4. start exploring the impact of micro-optimizations (prefetch etc.)
in the ixgbe driver.
Use 'legacy' descriptors on the tx ring and prefetch slots gives
about 20% speedup at 900 MHz. Another 7-10% would come from removing
the explict calls to bus_dmamap* in the core (they are effectively
NOPs in this case, but it takes expensive load of the per-buffer
dma maps to figure out that they are all NULL.
Rx performance not investigated.
I am postponing the MFC so i can import a few more improvements
before merging.
Introduce some functions to map NIC ring indexes into netmap ring
indexes and vice versa. This way we can implement the bound
checks only in one place (and hopefully in a correct way).
On passing, make the code and comments more uniform across the
various drivers.
txsync() and rxsync() callbacks, removing some variables made
useless by this change;
- add generic lock and irq handling routines. These can be useful
in case there are no driver locks that we can reuse;
- add a few macros to reduce differences with the Linux version.
TUNABLE variable (hw.netmap.buf_size) so we can experiment
with values different from 2048 which may give better cache performance.
- rearrange the memory allocation code so it will be easier
to replace it with a different implementation. The current code
relies on a single large contiguous chunk of memory obtained through
contigmalloc.
The new implementation (not committed yet) uses multiple
smaller chunks which are easier to fit in a fragmented address
space.
- remove experimental code for disabling CRC
- use the correct constant for conversion between interrupt rate
and EITR values (the previous values were off by a factor of 2)
- make dev.ix.N.queueM.interrupt_rate a RW sysctl variable.
Changing individual values affects the queue immediately,
and propagates to all interfaces at the next reinit.
- add dev.ix.N.queueM.irqs rdonly sysctl, to export the actual
interrupt counts
Netmap-related changes for ixgbe:
- use the "new" format for TX descriptors in netmap mode.
- pass interrupt mitigation delays to the user process doing poll()
on a netmap file descriptor.
On the RX side this means we will not check the ring more than once
per interrupt. This gives the process a chance to sleep and process
packets in larger batches, thus reducing CPU usage.
On the TX side we take this even further: completed transmissions are
reclaimed every half ring even if the NIC interrupts more often.
This saves even more CPU without any additional tx delays.
Generic Netmap-related changes:
- align the netmap_kring to cache lines so that there is no false sharing
(possibly useful for multiqueue NICs and MSIX interrupts, which are
handled by different cores). It's a minor improvement but it does not
cost anything.
Reviewed by: Jack Vogel
Approved by: Jack Vogel
1. as reported by Alexander Fiveg, the allocator was reporting
half of the allocated memory. Fix this by exiting from the
loop earlier (not too critical because this code is going
away soon).
2. following a discussion on freebsd-current
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-January/031144.html
turns out that (re)loading the dmamap was expensive and not optimized.
This operation is in the critical path when doing zero-copy forwarding
between interfaces.
At least on netmap and i386/amd64, the bus_dmamap_load can be
completely bypassed if the map is NULL, so we do it.
The latter change gives an almost 3x improvement in forwarding
performance, from the previous 9.5Mpps at 2.9GHz to the current
line rate (14.2Mpps) at 1.733GHz. (this is for 64+4 byte packets,
in other configurations the PCIe bus is a bottleneck).
the memory allocator used by netmap. No functional change,
two small bug fixes:
- in if_re.c add a missing bus_dmamap_sync()
- in netmap.c comment out a spurious free() in an error handling block
A link reset now is completely transparent for the netmap client:
even if the NIC resets its own ring (e.g. restarting from 0),
the client will not see any change in the current rx/tx positions,
because the driver will keep track of the offset between the two.
2. make the device-specific code more uniform across different drivers
There were some inconsistencies in the implementation of the netmap
support routines, now drivers have been aligned to a common
code structure.
3. import netmap support for ixgbe . This is implemented as a very
small patch for ixgbe.c (233 lines, 11 chunks, mostly comments:
in total the patch has only 54 lines of new code) , as most of
the code is in an external file sys/dev/netmap/ixgbe_netmap.h ,
following some initial comments from Jack Vogel about making
changes less intrusive.
(Note, i have emailed Jack multiple times asking if he had
comments on this structure of the code; i got no reply so
i assume he is fine with it).
Support for other drivers (em, lem, re, igb) will come later.
"ixgbe" is now the reference driver for netmap support. Both the
external file (sys/dev/netmap/ixgbe_netmap.h) and the device-specific
patches (in sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe.c) are heavily commented and should
serve as a reference for other device drivers.
Tested on i386 and amd64 with the pkt-gen program in tools/tools/netmap,
the sender does 14.88 Mpps at 1050 Mhz and 14.2 Mpps at 900 MHz
on an i7-860 with 4 cores and 82599 card. Haven't tried yet more
aggressive optimizations such as adding 'prefetch' instructions
in the time-critical parts of the code.
I/O from userspace, capable of line rate at 10G, see
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/
At this time I am bringing in only the generic code (sys/dev/netmap/
plus two headers under sys/net/), and some sample applications in
tools/tools/netmap. There is also a manpage in share/man/man4 [1]
In order to make use of the framework you need to build a kernel
with "device netmap", and patch individual drivers with the code
that you can find in
sys/dev/netmap/head.diff
The file will go away as the relevant pieces are committed to
the various device drivers, which should happen in a few days
after talking to the driver maintainers.
Netmap support is available at the moment for Intel 10G and 1G
cards (ixgbe, em/lem/igb), and for the Realtek 1G card ("re").
I have partial patches for "bge" and am starting to work on "cxgbe".
Hopefully changes are trivial enough so interested third parties
can submit their patches. Interested people can contact me
for advice on how to add netmap support to specific devices.
CREDITS:
Netmap has been developed by Luigi Rizzo and other collaborators
at the Universita` di Pisa, and supported by EU project CHANGE
(http://www.change-project.eu/)
The code is distributed under a BSD Copyright.
[1] In my opinion is a bad idea to have all manpage in one directory.
We should place kernel documentation in the same dir that contains
the code, which would make it much simpler to keep doc and code
in sync, reduce the clutter in share/man/ and incidentally is
the policy used for all of userspace code.
Makefiles and doc tools can be trivially adjusted to find the
manpages in the relevant subdirs.
