tree f1149ada9526c2e2e9ab46b909af0efdd5ce16d2
parent 81c1cd98351bec779c4587865b62bfbac72ee811
author Helen Koike <helen.koike@collabora.co.uk> 1491839467 -0300
committer Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> 1492785707 +0200

nvme: improve performance for virtual NVMe devices

This change provides a mechanism to reduce the number of MMIO doorbell
writes for the NVMe driver. When running in a virtualized environment
like QEMU, the cost of an MMIO is quite hefy here. The main idea for
the patch is provide the device two memory location locations:
 1) to store the doorbell values so they can be lookup without the doorbell
    MMIO write
 2) to store an event index.
I believe the doorbell value is obvious, the event index not so much.
Similar to the virtio specification, the virtual device can tell the
driver (guest OS) not to write MMIO unless you are writing past this
value.

FYI: doorbell values are written by the nvme driver (guest OS) and the
event index is written by the virtual device (host OS).

The patch implements a new admin command that will communicate where
these two memory locations reside. If the command fails, the nvme
driver will work as before without any optimizations.

Contributions:
  Eric Northup <digitaleric@google.com>
  Frank Swiderski <fes@google.com>
  Ted Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
  Keith Busch <keith.busch@intel.com>

Just to give an idea on the performance boost with the vendor
extension: Running fio [1], a stock NVMe driver I get about 200K read
IOPs with my vendor patch I get about 1000K read IOPs. This was
running with a null device i.e. the backing device simply returned
success on every read IO request.

[1] Running on a 4 core machine:
  fio --time_based --name=benchmark --runtime=30
  --filename=/dev/nvme0n1 --nrfiles=1 --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32
  --direct=1 --invalidate=1 --verify=0 --verify_fatal=0 --numjobs=4
  --rw=randread --blocksize=4k --randrepeat=false

Signed-off-by: Rob Nelson <rlnelson@google.com>
[mlin: port for upstream]
Signed-off-by: Ming Lin <mlin@kernel.org>
[koike: updated for upstream]
Signed-off-by: Helen Koike <helen.koike@collabora.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Keith Busch <keith.busch@intel.com>