[ovs-dev] [PATCH RFC net-next] openvswitch: Queue upcalls to userspace in per-port round-robin order

[Pravin Shelar]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 2:58 AM Stefano Brivio <sbrivio at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Pravin,
>
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:19:39 -0700
> Pravin Shelar <pshelar at ovn.org> wrote:
>
> > I understand fairness has cost, but we need to find right balance
> > between performance and fairness. Current fairness scheme is a
> > lockless algorithm without much computational overhead, did you try to
> > improve current algorithm so that it uses less number of ports.
>
> In the end, we tried harder as you suggested, and found out a way to
> avoid the need for per-thread sets of per-vport sockets: with a few
> changes, a process-wide set of per-vport sockets is actually enough to
> maintain the current fairness behaviour.
>
> Further, we can get rid of duplicate fd events if the EPOLLEXCLUSIVE
> epoll() flag is available, which improves performance noticeably. This
> is explained in more detail in the commit message of the ovs-vswitchd
> patch Matteo wrote [1], now merged.
>
> This approach solves the biggest issue (i.e. huge amount of netlink
> sockets) in ovs-vswitchd itself, without the need for kernel changes.
>

Thanks for working on this issue.

> It doesn't address some proposed improvements though, that is, it does
> nothing to improve the current fairness scheme, it won't allow neither
> the configurable fairness criteria proposed by Ben, nor usage of BPF
> maps for extensibility as suggested by William.
>
> I would however say that those topics bear definitely lower priority,
> and perhaps addressing them at all becomes overkill now that we don't
> any longer have a serious issue.
>
> [1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/974304/
Nice!

Thanks,
Pravin.