Re: [PATCH rdma-next 00/10] Enable relaxed ordering for ULPs

From: Keith Busch
Date: Mon Apr 05 2021 - 19:50:19 EST


On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 11:42:31PM +0000, Chuck Lever III wrote:
> > On Apr 5, 2021, at 4:07 PM, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 03:41:15PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> >> On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 08:23:54AM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> >>> From: Leon Romanovsky <leonro@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >>>
> >>>> From Avihai,
> >>>
> >>> Relaxed Ordering is a PCIe mechanism that relaxes the strict ordering
> >>> imposed on PCI transactions, and thus, can improve performance.
> >>>
> >>> Until now, relaxed ordering could be set only by user space applications
> >>> for user MRs. The following patch series enables relaxed ordering for the
> >>> kernel ULPs as well. Relaxed ordering is an optional capability, and as
> >>> such, it is ignored by vendors that don't support it.
> >>>
> >>> The following test results show the performance improvement achieved
> >>> with relaxed ordering. The test was performed on a NVIDIA A100 in order
> >>> to check performance of storage infrastructure over xprtrdma:
> >>
> >> Isn't the Nvidia A100 a GPU not actually supported by Linux at all?
> >> What does that have to do with storage protocols?
> >
> > I think it is a typo (or at least mit makes no sense to be talking
> > about NFS with a GPU chip) Probably it should be a DGX A100 which is a
> > dual socket AMD server with alot of PCIe, and xptrtrdma is a NFS-RDMA
> > workload.
>
> We need to get a better idea what correctness testing has been done,
> and whether positive correctness testing results can be replicated
> on a variety of platforms.
>
> I have an old Haswell dual-socket system in my lab, but otherwise
> I'm not sure I have a platform that would be interesting for such a
> test.

Not sure if Haswell will be useful for such testing. It looks like many
of those subscribe to 'quirk_relaxedordering_disable'.