Re: Any reason VIRTQUEUE_MAX_SIZE is 1024? Can we increase this limit?

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2020 at 11:35:08AM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> 
> On 2020/8/6 下午8:37, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 08:13:29AM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 01:11:07PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 07:46:09AM +0000, Yajun Wu wrote:
> > > > > I'm doing iperf test on VIRTIO net through vhost-user(HW VDPA).
> > > > > Find maximal acceptable tx_queue_size/rx_queue_size is 1024.
> > > > > Basically increase queue size can get better RX rate for my case.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Can we increase the limit(VIRTQUEUE_MAX_SIZE) to 8192 to possibly 
> > > > > gain better performance?
> > > > Hi,
> > > > The VIRTIO 1.1 specification says the maximum number of descriptors is
> > > > 32768 for both split and packed virtqueues.
> > > > 
> > > > The vhost kernel code seems to support 32768.
> > > > 
> > > > The 1024 limit is an implementation limit in QEMU. Increasing it would
> > > > require QEMU code changes. For example, VIRTQUEUE_MAX_SIZE is used as
> > > > the size of arrays.
> > > > 
> > > > I can't think of a fundamental reason why QEMU needs to limit itself to
> > > > 1024 descriptors. Raising the limit would require fixing up the code and
> > > > ensuring that live migration remains compatible with older versions of
> > > > QEMU.
> > > > 
> > > > Stefan
> > > There's actually a reason for a limit: in theory the vq size
> > > also sets a limit on the number of scatter/gather entries.
> > > both QEMU and vhost can't handle a packet split over > 1k chunks.
> > > 
> > > We could add an extra limit for s/g size like block and scsi do,
> > > this will need spec, guest and host side work.
> > Interesting, thanks for explaining! This could be made explicit by
> > changing the QEMU code to:
> > 
> > include/hw/virtio/virtio.h:#define VIRTQUEUE_MAX_SIZE IOV_MAX
> > 
> > Looking more closely at the vhost kernel code I see that UIO_MAXIOV is
> > used in some places but not in vhost_vring_set_num() (ioctl
> > VHOST_SET_VRING_NUM). Is there a reason why UIO_MAXIOV isn't enforced
> > when the application sets the queue size?
> 
> 
> Actually three things:
> 
> 1) queue size
> 2) #descriptors in a list
> 3) IOV size
> 
> Spec limit the 2) to 1) but 2) may not equal to 3).
> 
> So enforcing UIO_MAXIOV can not solve the problem completely.
> 
> For vhost-net, it depends on socket to build skb which requires an iov array
> to work. We need remove this limitation by:
> 
> - build skb by vhost-net itself
> - do piecewise copying
> 
> Then we're not limited with #iov and more and support up to what spec
> supports.

If I understand correctly, you are saying vhost_net.ko does not support
more than UIO_MAXIOV descriptors today but it could be fixed as you
described.

Thanks!

Stefan

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