GiantVM for Soft-RoCE and other RDMA protocol

[ChoKyuWon]

Current RDMA implementation of GiantVM (linux/arch/x86/kvm/krdma.c) using a normal RDMA wrapper function that normal linux kernel provided.

For example, the krdma_send function is implemented like this:

int krdma_send(struct krdma_cb *cb, const char *buffer, size_t length,
		unsigned long flag, const tx_add_t *tx_add)
{
	struct ib_send_wr *bad_wr;

	mutex_lock(&cb->slock);

        ...
	cb->send_trans_buf[slot].send_sge.length = length + (sizeof(tx_add_t) - sizeof(imm_t));
	cb->send_trans_buf[slot].sq_wr.wr_id = tx_add->txid;
	cb->send_trans_buf[slot].sq_wr.ex.imm_data = htonl(*(const uint32_t*)tx_add);
	memcpy(cb->send_trans_buf[slot].send_buf + length, (((const char *)tx_add) + sizeof(imm_t)),
			sizeof(tx_add_t) - sizeof(imm_t));
	memcpy(cb->send_trans_buf[slot].send_buf, buffer, length);

	ret = ib_post_send(cb->qp, &cb->send_trans_buf[slot].sq_wr, &bad_wr);
        ...

In this code, ib_post_send is defined at linux/include/rdma/ib_verbs.h, and the normal kernel RDMA implementations look like support Soft-RoCE. To be more specific, kernel implementation doesn't care what kind of device and device drivers are actually installed, they just work as wrapper functions.

GiantVM looks like using ib_core stack, so theoretically, there's no problem that using GiantVM on Soft-RoCE.

So here is my test plan:

1. Create two normal QEMU instances.
2. Connect them with ethernet, and install GiantVM kernel.
3. In QEMU instance, run GiantVM's QEMU
4. If Soft-RoCE support is perfect, it works without any problem.
5. If some problem occur, I'll report it on this issue.

And for other RDMA protocols like iWARP, they depend on TCP/IP, so it's not fit our model. I think those of protocols are for user, not kernel. Cisco report that in iWARP, remote R/W has almost same latency as local memory, but they experiments are based on 100Gbps ethernet card so I think it's not feasible in 10Gbps or 1Gbps ethernet card.

But testing GiantVM on other RDMA protocols sounds fun and interesting, so maybe it can be our next step: Benchmark GiantVM on variance RDMA protocols.

---

References:

1. HowTo Configure Soft-RoCE
2. CONFIGURING SOFT-ROCE
3. Implementing RDMA on Linux
4. SoftiWARP Performance with Chelsio 100GbE
5. RDMA 101 - Buiding virtual setup
   • It use Soft-iWARP, but it seems many of step are overlap with Soft-RoCE.