RE: [Qemu-devel] [virtio-dev] [RFC 0/3] Extend vhost-user to support VFIO based accelerators

["Liang, Cunming" <cunming.liang@intel.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Wang [mailto:jasowang@redhat.com]
> Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 3:22 PM
> To: Bie, Tiwei <tiwei.bie@intel.com>
> Cc: Tan, Jianfeng <jianfeng.tan@intel.com>; virtio-dev@lists.oasis-open.org;
> mst@redhat.com; Liang, Cunming <cunming.liang@intel.com>; qemu-
> devel@nongnu.org; alex.williamson@redhat.com; Wang, Xiao W
> <xiao.w.wang@intel.com>; stefanha@redhat.com; Wang, Zhihong
> <zhihong.wang@intel.com>; pbonzini@redhat.com; Daly, Dan
> <dan.daly@intel.com>
> Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [virtio-dev] [RFC 0/3] Extend vhost-user to support
> VFIO based accelerators
> 
> 
> 
> On 2018年01月04日 14:18, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 10:34:36PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> >> On 2017年12月22日 14:41, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> >>> This RFC patch set does some small extensions to vhost-user protocol
> >>> to support VFIO based accelerators, and makes it possible to get the
> >>> similar performance of VFIO passthru while keeping the virtio device
> >>> emulation in QEMU.
> >>>
> >>> When we have virtio ring compatible devices, it's possible to setup
> >>> the device (DMA mapping, PCI config, etc) based on the existing info
> >>> (memory-table, features, vring info, etc) which is available on the
> >>> vhost-backend (e.g. DPDK vhost library). Then, we will be able to
> >>> use such devices to accelerate the emulated device for the VM. And
> >>> we call it vDPA: vhost DataPath Acceleration. The key difference
> >>> between VFIO passthru and vDPA is that, in vDPA only the data path
> >>> (e.g. ring, notify and queue interrupt) is pass-throughed, the
> >>> device control path (e.g. PCI configuration space and MMIO regions)
> >>> is still defined and emulated by QEMU.
> >>>
> >>> The benefits of keeping virtio device emulation in QEMU compared
> >>> with virtio device VFIO passthru include (but not limit to):
> >>>
> >>> - consistent device interface from guest OS;
> >>> - max flexibility on control path and hardware design;
> >>> - leveraging the existing virtio live-migration framework;
> >>>
> >>> But the critical issue in vDPA is that the data path performance is
> >>> relatively low and some host threads are needed for the data path,
> >>> because some necessary mechanisms are missing to support:
> >>>
> >>> 1) guest driver notifies the device directly;
> >>> 2) device interrupts the guest directly;
> >>>
> >>> So this patch set does some small extensions to vhost-user protocol
> >>> to make both of them possible. It leverages the same mechanisms (e.g.
> >>> EPT and Posted-Interrupt on Intel platform) as the VFIO passthru to
> >>> achieve the data path pass through.
> >>>
> >>> A new protocol feature bit is added to negotiate the accelerator
> >>> feature support. Two new slave message types are added to enable the
> >>> notify and interrupt passthru for each queue. From the view of
> >>> vhost-user protocol design, it's very flexible. The passthru can be
> >>> enabled/disabled for each queue individually, and it's possible to
> >>> accelerate each queue by different devices. More design and
> >>> implementation details can be found from the last patch.
> >>>
> >>> There are some rough edges in this patch set (so this is a RFC patch
> >>> set for now), but it's never too early to hear the thoughts from the
> >>> community! So any comments and suggestions would be really
> appreciated!
> >>>
> >>> Tiwei Bie (3):
> >>>     vhost-user: support receiving file descriptors in slave_read
> >>>     vhost-user: introduce shared vhost-user state
> >>>     vhost-user: add VFIO based accelerators support
> >>>
> >>>    docs/interop/vhost-user.txt     |  57 ++++++
> >>>    hw/scsi/vhost-user-scsi.c       |   6 +-
> >>>    hw/vfio/common.c                |   2 +-
> >>>    hw/virtio/vhost-user.c          | 430
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
> >>>    hw/virtio/vhost.c               |   3 +-
> >>>    hw/virtio/virtio-pci.c          |   8 -
> >>>    hw/virtio/virtio-pci.h          |   8 +
> >>>    include/hw/vfio/vfio.h          |   2 +
> >>>    include/hw/virtio/vhost-user.h  |  43 ++++
> >>>    include/hw/virtio/virtio-scsi.h |   6 +-
> >>>    net/vhost-user.c                |  30 +--
> >>>    11 files changed, 561 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-)
> >>>    create mode 100644 include/hw/virtio/vhost-user.h
> >>>
> >> I may miss something, but may I ask why you must implement them
> >> through vhost-use/dpdk. It looks to me you could put all of them in
> >> qemu which could simplify a lots of things (just like userspace NVME
> driver wrote by Fam).
> >>
> > Thanks for your comments! :-)
> >
> > Yeah, you're right. We can also implement everything in QEMU like the
> > userspace NVME driver by Fam. It was also described by Cunming on the
> > KVM Forum 2017. Below is the link to the
> > slides:
> >
> > https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/KVM17%2
> > 7-vDPA.pdf
> 
> Thanks for the pointer. Looks rather interesting.
> 
> >
> > We're also working on it (including defining a standard device for
> > vhost data path acceleration based on mdev to hide vendor specific
> > details).
> 
> This is exactly what I mean. Form my point of view, there's no need for any
> extension for vhost protocol, we just need to reuse qemu iothread to
> implement a userspace vhost dataplane and do the mdev inside that thread.
On functional perspective, it makes sense to have qemu native support of those certain usage. However, qemu doesn't have to take responsibility for dataplane. There're already huge amounts of codes for different devices emulation, leveraging external dataplane library is an effective way to introduce more. The beauty of vhost_user is to open a door for variable userland workloads(e.g. vswitch). The dataplane connected with VM usually need to be close integrated with those userland workloads, a control place interface(vhost-user) is better than a datapath interface(e.g. provided by dataplace in qemu iothread). On workloads point of view, it's not excited to be part of qemu process.
That comes up with the idea of vhost-user extension. Userland workloads decides to enable accelerators or not, qemu provides the common control plane infrastructure.

> 
> >
> > And IMO it's also not a bad idea to extend vhost-user protocol
> > to support the accelerators if possible. And it could be more
> > flexible because it could support (for example) below things
> > easily without introducing any complex command line options or
> > monitor commands to QEMU:
> 
> Maybe I was wrong but I don't think we care about the complexity of
> command line or monitor command in this case.
> 
> >
> > - the switching among different accelerators and software version
> >    can be done at runtime in vhost process;
> > - use different accelerators to accelerate different queue pairs
> >    or just accelerate some (instead of all) queue pairs;
> 
> Well, technically, if we want, these could be implemented in qemu too.
You're right if just considering I/O. The ways to consume those I/O is another perspective.
Simply 1:1 associating guest virtio-net and accelerator w/ SW datapath fallback is not the whole picture. It's variable usages on workload side to abstract the device (e.g. port re-presenter for vswitch) and etc. I don't think qemu is interested for all bunch of things there.

> 
> And here's some more advantages if you implement it in qemu:
> 
> 1) Avoid extra dependency like dpdk
> 2) More flexible, mdev could even choose to not use VFIO or not depend
> on vDPA
> 3) More efficient guest IOMMU integration especially for dynamic
> mappings (device IOTLB transactions could be done by function calls
> instead of slow UDP messages)
> 4) Zerocopy (for non intel vDPA) is more easier to be implemented
> 5) Compare to vhost-user, tightly coupled with device emulation can
> simplify lots of things (an example is programmable flow director/RSS
> implementation). And any future enhancement to virtio does not need to
> introduce new type of vhost-user messages.
> 
> I don't object vhost-user/dpdk method but I second for implementing all
> the stuffs in qemu.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Tiwei Bie
> >