Netmap with VMWare

[Pradosh Datta]

Hi Luigi,

Thank you for your response and the reference to the paper. After receiving
your comment, for the time being, I shifted my focus to PCI-Passthrough
because without modifying the host, it will not be possible to achieve line
rate between guest-to-guest.

With PCI-Passthrough enabled in ESXi, I am able to test with ixgbe (device:
82599) with netmap. But here again I am reaching maximum of ~5.5Gbps (with
64byte pkt, single CPU 2666.761MHz), the pkt-gen is using ~73%. I looked
into another paper related to ptnetmap, but that again needs hypervisor
change (and I do not want to go into that).

I played with different values with 'ethtool --coalesce rx-usecs' - nothing
is helping. The flow-control is also disabled.

Are there any specific CONFIG(s) I need to enable/disable while compiling
the linux-kernel (3.10 x86_64), or compiling the ixgbe driver (I am using
3.13.10)?
Also, the sections 3.X in the paper (Speeding Up Packet I/O in Virtual
Machines - Our Works) describes many ways of improvement - are those need
to be taken care in case of PCI-Passthrough as well?
If you are already aware of any experiment, is it possible to achieve line
rate using PCI-Passthrough with netmap?

Again thanks for your time and help.

Best Regards,
Pradosh

(NB: one typo correction in my last mail, with e1000 ...throughput is _not_
close to line rate)


On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 5:14 AM, Pradosh Datta <pradosh.datta at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I am trying to use the netmap on vmware in CentOS guests, I am able to
> use
> > netmap with the e1000 driver on vmware (though the throughput is close to
> > line speed).
> >
> > But is there any way to use the netmap with vmxnet3? Is there any patch
> > available to support that? Or any suggestion on how can I achieve
> > high-packet-rate between vm-to-vm using netmap?
>
> The vm-to-vm bottleneck is typically in the hypervisor (vmware) and the
> switch (in this case it may be the linux bridge in centos).
>
> I am afraid just using netmap in the guest won't help you much in this
> respect.
> See our ANCS'13 paper
> http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/papers/20130903-rizzo-ancs.pdf
> for what you can expect (look at the unmodified hypervisor/linux bridge
> case).
>
> This said, you can always use netmap (in emulated mode) on any network
> interface
> in the guest.
>
> cheers
> luigi
>
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Pradosh
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-net at freebsd.org mailing list
> > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------+-------------------------------
>  Prof. Luigi RIZZO, rizzo at iet.unipi.it  . Dip. di Ing. dell'Informazione
>  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/        . Universita` di Pisa
>  TEL      +39-050-2217533               . via Diotisalvi 2
>  Mobile   +39-338-6809875               . 56122 PISA (Italy)
> -----------------------------------------+-------------------------------
>