Testing RHEL 5.3 virtio_net drivers with RHEL5 KVM, I notice that the guest rarely sends packets greater than a page to the host. Given that we have GSO support, sending 64k GSO packets would be much more efficient. Herbert points out this fix in 2.6.26: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=69d15067 [TCP]: Let skbs grow over a page on fast peers While testing the virtio-net driver on KVM with TSO I noticed that TSO performance with a 1500 MTU is significantly worse compared to the performance of non-TSO with a 16436 MTU. The packet dump shows that most of the packets sent are smaller than a page. Looking at the code this actually is quite obvious as it always stop extending the packet if it's the first packet yet to be sent and if it's larger than the MSS. Since each extension is bound by the page size, this means that (given a 1500 MTU) we're very unlikely to construct packets greater than a page, provided that the receiver and the path is fast enough so that packets can always be sent immediately. The fix is also quite obvious. The push calls inside the loop is just an optimisation so that we don't end up doing all the sending at the end of the loop. Therefore there is no specific reason why it has to do so at MSS boundaries. For TSO, the most natural extension of this optimisation is to do the pushing once the skb exceeds the TSO size goal. This is what the patch does and testing with KVM shows that the TSO performance with a 1500 MTU easily surpasses that of a 16436 MTU and indeed the packet sizes sent are generally larger than 16436. I don't see any obvious downsides for slower peers or connections, but it would be prudent to test this extensively to ensure that those cases don't regress. I've tested this with RHEL5 virtio_net and it gives a >200% increase in the results of a guest->host netperf micro benchmark with 64k send buffers. The patch is very straightforward and required no backporting.
Created attachment 320995 [details] tcp-Let-skbs-grow-over-a-page-on-fast-peers.patch Posted to rhkernel-list
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
in kernel-2.6.18-121.el5 You can download this test kernel from http://people.redhat.com/dzickus/el5
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-0225.html