Thanks for your response. I am actually more interested in stock (non-dpdk) vmxnet3 driver vs. vmxnet3 pmd driver comparison.
When I forward pkts from stock vmxnet3 driver, I am able to achieve much higher throughput than with vmxnet3 pmd. To make comparison fair, I did not leverage gro/gso. Does any of the overheads you mentioned play a role in this comparison? Here I am comparing different drivers for the same vmxnet3 interface... Regards, Hyunseok On Jul 7, 2014 7:03 PM, "Patel, Rashmin N" <rashmin.n.patel at intel.com> wrote: > Hi Hyunseok, > > We should not compare Vmxnet3-PMD with ixgbe-PMD performance as Vmxnet3 > device is a para-virtual device and it's not similar to directly assigned > device to a VM either. > There is VMEXIT/VMEXIT occurrence at burst-size boundary and that overhead > can?t be eliminated unless the design of Vmxnet3 is updated in future. In > addition to that the packets is being touched in ESXi hypervisor vSwitch > layer between physical NIC and a virtual machine, which introduces extra > overhead, which you won't have in case of using Niantic being used natively > or passed through Vt-d to a virtual machine. > > Feature wise, we can compare it to Virtio-PMD solution, but again there is > a little different in device handling and backend driver support compared > to Vmxnet3 device so performance comparison won?t to apple to apple. > > Thanks, > Rashmin > > -----Original Message----- > From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Hyunseok > Sent: Monday, July 07, 2014 3:22 PM > To: dev at dpdk.org > Subject: [dpdk-dev] Performance issue with vmxnet3 pmd > > Hi, > > I was testing l2-fwd with vmxnet3 pmd (included in dpdk). > > The maximum forwarding rate I got from vmxnet3 pmd with l2fwd is only 2.5 > to 2.8 Gbps. > > This is in contrast with ixgbe pmd with which I could easily achieve 10 > gbps forwarding rate. > > With the original vmxnet3 driver (non pmd), I could also achieve close to > 10 gpbs with multiple iperf. But I can never achieve that rate with > vmxnet3 pmd... > > So basically vmxnet3 pmd doesn't seem that fast. Is this a known issue? > > Thanks, > -Hyunseok >
