Exceed 1GB/s with virtio-net ?
Hello
I'm trying to achieve higher than gigabit transferts over a virtio NIC with no success, and I can't find a recent bug or discussion about such an issue.
The simpler test consist of two VM running on a high-end blade server with 4 cores and 4GB RAM each, and a virtio NIC dedicated to the inter-VM communication. On the host, the two vnet interfaces are enslaved into a bridge. I use a combination of 2.6.35 on the host and 2.6.32 in the VMs.
Running iperf or netperf on these VMs, with TCP or UDP, result in ~900Mbits/s transferts. This is what could be expected of a 1G interface, and indeed the e1000 emulation performs similar.
Changing the txqueuelen, MTU, and offloading settings on every interface (bridge/tap/virtio_net) didn't improve the speed, nor did the installation of irqbalance and the increase in CPU and RAM.
Is this normal ? Is the multiple queue patch intended to address this ? It's quite possible I missed something :)
Thank you dear list !
Signature · 6 lines
Thibault VINCENT SmartJog S.A.S. - Groupe TDF - Pôle multimédia 27 Bd Hippolyte Marques, 94200 Ivry sur Seine, France Phone : +33.1.58.68.62.38 Fax : +33.1.58.68.60.97
Quoted 15 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Hello
I'm trying to achieve higher than gigabit transferts over a virtio NIC with no success, and I can't find a recent bug or discussion about such an issue.
The simpler test consist of two VM running on a high-end blade server with 4 cores and 4GB RAM each, and a virtio NIC dedicated to the inter-VM communication. On the host, the two vnet interfaces are enslaved into a bridge. I use a combination of 2.6.35 on the host and 2.6.32 in the VMs.
Running iperf or netperf on these VMs, with TCP or UDP, result in ~900Mbits/s transferts. This is what could be expected of a 1G interface, and indeed the e1000 emulation performs similar.
Quoted 6 lines
Changing the txqueuelen, MTU, and offloading settings on every interface (bridge/tap/virtio_net) didn't improve the speed, nor did the installation of irqbalance and the increase in CPU and RAM.
Is this normal ? Is the multiple queue patch intended to address this ? It's quite possible I missed something :)
I'm able to achieve quite a bit more than 1Gbps using virtio-net between 2 guests on the same host connected via an internal bridge. With the virtio-net TX bottom half handler I can easily hit 7Gbps TCP and 10+Gbps UDP using netperf (TCP_STREAM/UDP_STREAM tests). Even without the bottom half patches (not yet in qemu-kvm.git), I can get ~5Gbps. Maybe you could describe your setup further, host details, bridge setup, guests, specific tests, etc... Thanks,
Alex
Quoted 24 lines · Alex Williamson
Quoted 15 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Hello
I'm trying to achieve higher than gigabit transferts over a virtio NIC with no success, and I can't find a recent bug or discussion about such an issue.
The simpler test consist of two VM running on a high-end blade server with 4 cores and 4GB RAM each, and a virtio NIC dedicated to the inter-VM communication. On the host, the two vnet interfaces are enslaved into a bridge. I use a combination of 2.6.35 on the host and 2.6.32 in the VMs.
Running iperf or netperf on these VMs, with TCP or UDP, result in ~900Mbits/s transferts. This is what could be expected of a 1G interface, and indeed the e1000 emulation performs similar.Quoted 6 lines
Changing the txqueuelen, MTU, and offloading settings on every interface (bridge/tap/virtio_net) didn't improve the speed, nor did the installation of irqbalance and the increase in CPU and RAM.
Is this normal ? Is the multiple queue patch intended to address this ? It's quite possible I missed something :)
Quoted 7 lines
I'm able to achieve quite a bit more than 1Gbps using virtio-net between 2 guests on the same host connected via an internal bridge. With the virtio-net TX bottom half handler I can easily hit 7Gbps TCP and 10+Gbps UDP using netperf (TCP_STREAM/UDP_STREAM tests). Even without the bottom half patches (not yet in qemu-kvm.git), I can get ~5Gbps. Maybe you could describe your setup further, host details, bridge setup, guests, specific tests, etc... Thanks,
Thanks Alex, I don't use the bottom half patches but anything between 3Gbps and 5Gbps would be fine. Here are some more details:
Host
-----
Dell M610 ; 2 x Xeon X5650 ; 6 x 8GB
Debian Squeeze amd64
qemu-kvm 0.12.5+dfsg-1
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)
Guests
-------
Debian Squeeze amd64
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)
To measure the throughput between the guests, I do the following.
On the host:
* create a bridge
# brctl addbr br_test # ifconfig br_test 1.1.1.1 up * start two guests # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb0,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b0 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb1,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b1 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 * add guests to the bridge # brctl addif br_test tap0 # brctl addif br_test tap1
On the first guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.2 up # iperf -s -i 1
On the second guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.3 up # iperf -c 1.1.1.2 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.2, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 43510 connected with 1.1.1.2 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 80.7 MBytes 677 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 102 MBytes 855 Mbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 101 MBytes 847 Mbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 104 MBytes 873 Mbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 104 MBytes 874 Mbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 105 MBytes 881 Mbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 103 MBytes 862 Mbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 101 MBytes 848 Mbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 105 MBytes 878 Mbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 105 MBytes 882 Mbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1011 MBytes 848 Mbits/sec
On the host again:
# iperf -c 1.1.1.1 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.1, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 60456 connected with 1.1.1.1 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 97.9 MBytes 821 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 136 MBytes 1.14 Gbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 153 MBytes 1.28 Gbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 160 MBytes 1.34 Gbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 156 MBytes 1.31 Gbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 122 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 121 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 137 MBytes 1.15 Gbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 139 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 140 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.33 GBytes 1.14 Gbits/sec
You can see it's quite slow compared to your figures, between the guests and with the host too. And there is no specific load on any of the three systems, htop in a guest only report one of the four cores going up to 70% (sys+user+wait) during the test.
The other tests I mentioned are:
* iperf or netperf over UDP : maybe 10% faster, no more
* interface settings : very very few effect
# ifconfig [br_test,tap0,tap1,eth0] txqueuelen 20000 # ifconfig eth0 mtu 65534 <-- guest only # ethtool -K eth0 gso on <-- guest only * double the RAM or number of CPU in the guests, no effect * run the two guests on separate hosts, linked with a 10G net, again it's exactly the same throughput. I can get >7Gbps between the hosts.
Then I reproduced the test on a completely different system, a desktop with Intel i5, 4GB, Debian Squeeze. And unfortunately I get the same figures, so the limitation doesn't seem to be hardware bounded.
What's your distro, kernel, and kvm version Alex ? Do you think I need to compile qemu with a specific patch or option that may be missing in the Squeeze source ?
Thanks!
Signature · 6 lines
Thibault VINCENT SmartJog S.A.S. - Groupe TDF - Pôle multimédia 27 Bd Hippolyte Marques, 94200 Ivry sur Seine, France Phone : +33.1.58.68.62.38 Fax : +33.1.58.68.60.97
Quoted 130 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Quoted 24 lines · Alex Williamson
Quoted 15 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Hello
I'm trying to achieve higher than gigabit transferts over a virtio NIC with no success, and I can't find a recent bug or discussion about such an issue.
The simpler test consist of two VM running on a high-end blade server with 4 cores and 4GB RAM each, and a virtio NIC dedicated to the inter-VM communication. On the host, the two vnet interfaces are enslaved into a bridge. I use a combination of 2.6.35 on the host and 2.6.32 in the VMs.
Running iperf or netperf on these VMs, with TCP or UDP, result in ~900Mbits/s transferts. This is what could be expected of a 1G interface, and indeed the e1000 emulation performs similar.Quoted 6 lines
Changing the txqueuelen, MTU, and offloading settings on every interface (bridge/tap/virtio_net) didn't improve the speed, nor did the installation of irqbalance and the increase in CPU and RAM.
Is this normal ? Is the multiple queue patch intended to address this ? It's quite possible I missed something :)
Quoted 7 lines
I'm able to achieve quite a bit more than 1Gbps using virtio-net between 2 guests on the same host connected via an internal bridge. With the virtio-net TX bottom half handler I can easily hit 7Gbps TCP and 10+Gbps UDP using netperf (TCP_STREAM/UDP_STREAM tests). Even without the bottom half patches (not yet in qemu-kvm.git), I can get ~5Gbps. Maybe you could describe your setup further, host details, bridge setup, guests, specific tests, etc... Thanks,
Thanks Alex, I don't use the bottom half patches but anything between 3Gbps and 5Gbps would be fine. Here are some more details:
Host
-----
Dell M610 ; 2 x Xeon X5650 ; 6 x 8GB
Debian Squeeze amd64
qemu-kvm 0.12.5+dfsg-1
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)Guests
-------
Debian Squeeze amd64
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)To measure the throughput between the guests, I do the following.
On the host:
* create a bridge# brctl addbr br_test # ifconfig br_test 1.1.1.1 up * start two guests # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb0,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b0 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb1,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b1 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 * add guests to the bridge # brctl addif br_test tap0 # brctl addif br_test tap1On the first guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.2 up # iperf -s -i 1On the second guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.3 up # iperf -c 1.1.1.2 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.2, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 43510 connected with 1.1.1.2 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 80.7 MBytes 677 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 102 MBytes 855 Mbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 101 MBytes 847 Mbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 104 MBytes 873 Mbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 104 MBytes 874 Mbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 105 MBytes 881 Mbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 103 MBytes 862 Mbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 101 MBytes 848 Mbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 105 MBytes 878 Mbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 105 MBytes 882 Mbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1011 MBytes 848 Mbits/secOn the host again:
# iperf -c 1.1.1.1 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.1, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 60456 connected with 1.1.1.1 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 97.9 MBytes 821 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 136 MBytes 1.14 Gbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 153 MBytes 1.28 Gbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 160 MBytes 1.34 Gbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 156 MBytes 1.31 Gbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 122 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 121 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 137 MBytes 1.15 Gbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 139 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 140 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.33 GBytes 1.14 Gbits/secYou can see it's quite slow compared to your figures, between the guests and with the host too. And there is no specific load on any of the three systems, htop in a guest only report one of the four cores going up to 70% (sys+user+wait) during the test.
The other tests I mentioned are:
* iperf or netperf over UDP : maybe 10% faster, no more
* interface settings : very very few effect# ifconfig [br_test,tap0,tap1,eth0] txqueuelen 20000 # ifconfig eth0 mtu 65534 <-- guest only # ethtool -K eth0 gso on <-- guest only * double the RAM or number of CPU in the guests, no effect * run the two guests on separate hosts, linked with a 10G net, again it's exactly the same throughput. I can get >7Gbps between the hosts.
Quoted 7 lines
Then I reproduced the test on a completely different system, a desktop with Intel i5, 4GB, Debian Squeeze. And unfortunately I get the same figures, so the limitation doesn't seem to be hardware bounded.
What's your distro, kernel, and kvm version Alex ? Do you think I need to compile qemu with a specific patch or option that may be missing in the Squeeze source ?
Do you by chance see better performance if you test a freshly booted guest with less than 5 minutes of uptime? I see a pretty significant drop in throughput ramp-up at the 5 minute mark that I haven't been able to explain. On qemu-kvm, this can keep me below 1Gbps for 1s tests, but I mostly get up to normal throughput by 10s.
It might be worthwhile for you to build your own qemu-kvm and maybe even incorporate the bottom half TX patches. These should be in the qemu-kvm tree whenever the next qemu merge happens (very soon). With those, my peak throughput is ~3x higher. Also, for best performance pay attention to cpufreq on the host. You might want to use the performance governor for testing. You shouldn't need any special configure options for qemu-kvm.git, I typically only use the --prefix option. Thanks,
Alex
I had a similar problem with virtio. With kernels newer than 2.6.31.5 and KVM versions greater than 11 my throughput decreased dramatically. While with kernel 2.6.31.5 and version 11 software I could only get around 1.5 Gbps max with a single iperf thread. Moving to higher versions of the software only produced poorer results, with the 2.6.35.4 kernel and version 0.12.50 KVM/QEMU yielded only ~.418 Gbps. The only way I have found to achieve more than ~1.5 Gbps was to use the PCI Pass-through option. With that option I can get roughly 6 Gbps with a single iperf thread and in the 8 Gb range for multiple threads.
--Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alex Williamson
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:01 AM
To: Thibault VINCENT
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Exceed 1GB/s with virtio-net ?
Quoted 130 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Quoted 24 lines · Alex Williamson
Quoted 15 lines · Thibault VINCENT
Hello
I'm trying to achieve higher than gigabit transferts over a virtio NIC with no success, and I can't find a recent bug or discussion about such an issue.
The simpler test consist of two VM running on a high-end blade server with 4 cores and 4GB RAM each, and a virtio NIC dedicated to the inter-VM communication. On the host, the two vnet interfaces are enslaved into a bridge. I use a combination of 2.6.35 on the host and 2.6.32 in the VMs.
Running iperf or netperf on these VMs, with TCP or UDP, result in ~900Mbits/s transferts. This is what could be expected of a 1G interface, and indeed the e1000 emulation performs similar.Quoted 6 lines
Changing the txqueuelen, MTU, and offloading settings on every interface (bridge/tap/virtio_net) didn't improve the speed, nor did the installation of irqbalance and the increase in CPU and RAM.
Is this normal ? Is the multiple queue patch intended to address this ? It's quite possible I missed something :)
Quoted 7 lines
I'm able to achieve quite a bit more than 1Gbps using virtio-net between 2 guests on the same host connected via an internal bridge. With the virtio-net TX bottom half handler I can easily hit 7Gbps TCP and 10+Gbps UDP using netperf (TCP_STREAM/UDP_STREAM tests). Even without the bottom half patches (not yet in qemu-kvm.git), I can get ~5Gbps. Maybe you could describe your setup further, host details, bridge setup, guests, specific tests, etc... Thanks,
Thanks Alex, I don't use the bottom half patches but anything between 3Gbps and 5Gbps would be fine. Here are some more details:
Host
-----
Dell M610 ; 2 x Xeon X5650 ; 6 x 8GB
Debian Squeeze amd64
qemu-kvm 0.12.5+dfsg-1
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)Guests
-------
Debian Squeeze amd64
kernel 2.6.35-1 amd64 (Debian Experimental)To measure the throughput between the guests, I do the following.
On the host:
* create a bridge# brctl addbr br_test # ifconfig br_test 1.1.1.1 up * start two guests # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb0,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b0 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 # kvm -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -drive file=/dev/vg/deb1,id=0,boot=on,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=0,id=0 -device virtio-net-pci,vlan=0,id=1,mac=52:54:00:cf:6a:b1 -net tap,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 * add guests to the bridge # brctl addif br_test tap0 # brctl addif br_test tap1On the first guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.2 up # iperf -s -i 1On the second guest:
# ifconfig eth0 1.1.1.3 up # iperf -c 1.1.1.2 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.2, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 43510 connected with 1.1.1.2 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 80.7 MBytes 677 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 102 MBytes 855 Mbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 101 MBytes 847 Mbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 104 MBytes 873 Mbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 104 MBytes 874 Mbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 105 MBytes 881 Mbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 103 MBytes 862 Mbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 101 MBytes 848 Mbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 105 MBytes 878 Mbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 105 MBytes 882 Mbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1011 MBytes 848 Mbits/secOn the host again:
# iperf -c 1.1.1.1 -i 1 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 1.1.1.1, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 1.1.1.3 port 60456 connected with 1.1.1.1 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 97.9 MBytes 821 Mbits/sec [ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 136 MBytes 1.14 Gbits/sec [ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 153 MBytes 1.28 Gbits/sec [ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 160 MBytes 1.34 Gbits/sec [ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 156 MBytes 1.31 Gbits/sec [ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 122 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 121 MBytes 1.02 Gbits/sec [ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 137 MBytes 1.15 Gbits/sec [ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 139 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 9.0-10.0 sec 140 MBytes 1.17 Gbits/sec [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.33 GBytes 1.14 Gbits/secYou can see it's quite slow compared to your figures, between the guests and with the host too. And there is no specific load on any of the three systems, htop in a guest only report one of the four cores going up to 70% (sys+user+wait) during the test.
The other tests I mentioned are:
* iperf or netperf over UDP : maybe 10% faster, no more
* interface settings : very very few effect# ifconfig [br_test,tap0,tap1,eth0] txqueuelen 20000 # ifconfig eth0 mtu 65534 <-- guest only # ethtool -K eth0 gso on <-- guest only * double the RAM or number of CPU in the guests, no effect * run the two guests on separate hosts, linked with a 10G net, again it's exactly the same throughput. I can get >7Gbps between the hosts.
Quoted 7 lines
Then I reproduced the test on a completely different system, a desktop with Intel i5, 4GB, Debian Squeeze. And unfortunately I get the same figures, so the limitation doesn't seem to be hardware bounded.
What's your distro, kernel, and kvm version Alex ? Do you think I need to compile qemu with a specific patch or option that may be missing in the Squeeze source ?
Do you by chance see better performance if you test a freshly booted guest with less than 5 minutes of uptime? I see a pretty significant drop in throughput ramp-up at the 5 minute mark that I haven't been able to explain. On qemu-kvm, this can keep me below 1Gbps for 1s tests, but I mostly get up to normal throughput by 10s.
It might be worthwhile for you to build your own qemu-kvm and maybe even incorporate the bottom half TX patches. These should be in the qemu-kvm tree whenever the next qemu merge happens (very soon). With those, my peak throughput is ~3x higher. Also, for best performance pay attention to cpufreq on the host. You might want to use the performance governor for testing. You shouldn't need any special configure options for qemu-kvm.git, I typically only use the --prefix option. Thanks,
Alex
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