I am using Spirent to send a 2Gbps traffic to a 10G port that are looped back by l2fwd+DPDK+virtio in a CentOS 32-bit and receive on the other port only at 700 Mbps. The CentOS 32-bit is on a Fedora 18 KVM host. The virtual interfaces are configured as virtio port type, not e1000. vhost-net was automatically used in qemu-kvm when virtio ports are used in the guest.
The questions are A. Why it can only reach 2Gbps B. Why outw() is using 40% of the entire measurement when it only try to write 2 bytes to the IO port using assembly outw command ? Is it a blocking call ? or it wastes time is mapping from the IO address of the guest to the physical address of the IO port on the host ? C. any way to improve it ? D. vmxnet PMD codes are using memory mapped IO address, not port IO address. Will it be faster to use memory mapped IO address ? Any pointers or feedback will help. Thanks James --- While the traffic is on, I run a oprofile and oreport using the following scripts on a seperate xterm window. 1. ./oprofile_start.sh 2. wait for 10 seconds 3. ./oprofile_stop.sh :::::::::::::: oprofile_start.sh :::::::::::::: #!/bin/bash opcontrol --reset opcontrol --deinit modprobe oprofile timer=1 opcontrol --no-vmlinux --separate=cpu,thread --callgraph=10 --separate=kernel opcontrol --session-dir=/root opcontrol --start :::::::::::::: oprofile_stop.sh :::::::::::::: opcontrol --dump opcontrol --stop opcontrol --shutdown opreport --session-dir=/root --details --merge tgid --symbols /root/dpdk/dpdk-1.3.1r2/examples/l2fwd/build/l2fwd Profiling through timer interrupt vma samples % image name symbol name 00000d36 5445 40.1105 librte_pmd_virtio.so outw 00000d54 5442 99.9449 00000d55 3 0.0551 00003032 3513 25.8785 librte_pmd_virtio.so virtio_recv_buf --- static void outw_jyu1(unsigned short int value, unsigned short int __port){ __asm__ __volatile__ ("outw %w0,%w1": :"a" (value), "Nd" (__port)); } --- This link http://www.cs.nthu.edu.tw/~ychung/slides/Virtualization/VM-Lecture-2-3-IO%20Virtualization.pptx(page 17 ? 22) described about the how IO ports can be accessed.