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From: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp•com.au>
To: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey•ws>,
	"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat•com>,
	Thomas Lendacky <tahm@linux•vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail•com>,
	virtualization@lists•linux-foundation.org,
	linux-kernel@vger•kernel.org, avi@redhat•com,
	kvm@vger•kernel.org, netdev@vger•kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] virtio-net: inline header support
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:47:59 +0930	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87r4pe24u0.fsf@rustcorp.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87sj9vxbnf.fsf@codemonkey.ws>

Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey•ws> writes:

> Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp•com.au> writes:
>
>> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat•com> writes:
>>
>> There's a reason I haven't done this.  I really, really dislike "my
>> implemention isn't broken" feature bits.  We could have an infinite
>> number of them, for each bug in each device.
>>
>> So my plan was to tie this assumption to the new PCI layout.  And have a
>> stress-testing patch like the one below in the kernel (see my virtio-wip
>> branch for stuff like this).  Turn it on at boot with
>> "virtio_ring.torture" on the kernel commandline.
>>
>> BTW, I've fixed lguest, but my kvm here (Ubuntu precise, kvm-qemu 1.0)
>> is too old.  Building the latest git now...
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Rusty.
>>
>> Subject: virtio: CONFIG_VIRTIO_DEVICE_TORTURE
>>
>> Virtio devices are not supposed to depend on the framing of the scatter-gather
>> lists, but various implementations did.  Safeguard this in future by adding
>> an option to deliberately create perverse descriptors.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp•com.au>
>
> Ignore framing is really a bad idea.  You want backends to enforce
> reasonable framing because guest's shouldn't do silly things with framing.
>
> For instance, with virtio-blk, if you want decent performance, you
> absolutely want to avoid bouncing the data.  If you're using O_DIRECT in
> the host to submit I/O requests, then it's critical that all of the s/g
> elements are aligned to a sector boundary and sized to a sector
> boundary.
>
> Yes, QEMU can handle if that's not the case, but it would be insanely
> stupid for a guest not to do this.  This is the sort of thing that ought
> to be enforced in the specification because a guest cannot perform well
> if it doesn't follow these rules.

Lack of imagination is what got us into trouble in the first place; when
presented with one counter-example, it's useful to look for others.

That's our job, not to dismiss them a "insanely stupid".

For example:
1) Perhaps the guest isn't trying to perform well, it's trying to be a
   tiny bootloader?
2) Perhaps the guest is the direct consumer, and aligning buffers is
   redundant.

> A spec isn't terribly useful if the result is guest drivers that are
> slow.  There's very little to gain by not enforcing rules around framing
> and there's a lot to lose if a guest frames incorrectly.

The guest has the flexibility, and gets to decide.  The spec is not
forcing them to perform badly.

> In the rare case where we want to make a framing change, we should use
> feature bits like Michael is proposing.
>
> In this case, we should simply say that with the feature bit, the vnet
> header can be in the same element as the data but not allow the header
> to be spread across multiple elements.

I'd love to split struct virtio_net_hdr_mrg_rxbuf, so the num_buffers
ends up somewhere else.

The simplest rules are "never" or "always".

Cheers,
Rusty.
PS.  Inserting zero-length buffers is something I'd be prepared to rule
     out, my current patch does it just for yuks...

  reply	other threads:[~2012-10-04  5:17 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 30+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-09-28  9:26 [PATCH 0/3] virtio-net: inline header support Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-09-28  9:26 ` [PATCH 1/3] virtio: add API to query ring capacity Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-09-28  9:26 ` [PATCH 2/3] virtio-net: correct capacity math on ring full Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-10-04  0:24   ` Rusty Russell
2012-09-28  9:26 ` [PATCH 3/3] virtio-net: put virtio net header inline with data Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-10-03  6:44 ` [PATCH 0/3] virtio-net: inline header support Rusty Russell
2012-10-03  7:10   ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-04  1:24   ` Anthony Liguori
2012-10-04  3:34     ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-04  4:29       ` Anthony Liguori
2012-10-04  7:44         ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-05  7:47           ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-08 21:31       ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-10-04  1:35   ` Anthony Liguori
2012-10-04  5:17     ` Rusty Russell [this message]
2012-10-08 20:41   ` Michael S. Tsirkin
     [not found] ` <87vces2gxq.fsf__45058.6618776017$1349247807$gmane$org@rustcorp.com.au>
2012-10-03 10:53   ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-04  0:11     ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-04  7:09       ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-04 12:51         ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-04 13:23           ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-05  5:43             ` Rusty Russell
     [not found]             ` <87391t1nkq.fsf__40391.6521034718$1349505001$gmane$org@rustcorp.com.au>
2012-10-06 12:54               ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-09  4:59                 ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-09  7:27                   ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-11  0:03                     ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-11 11:04                       ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-10-11 22:37                         ` Rusty Russell
2012-10-12  7:38                           ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-12 11:52                           ` Cornelia Huck

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