dpdk: Support both shared and per port mempools.

This commit re-introduces the concept of shared mempools as the default
memory model for DPDK devices. Per port mempools are still available but
must be enabled explicitly by a user.

OVS previously used a shared mempool model for ports with the same MTU
and socket configuration. This was replaced by a per port mempool model
to address issues flagged by users such as:

https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-discuss/2016-September/042560.html

However the per port model potentially requires an increase in memory
resource requirements to support the same number of ports and configuration
as the shared port model.

This is considered a blocking factor for current deployments of OVS
when upgrading to future OVS releases as a user may have to redimension
memory for the same deployment configuration. This may not be possible for
users.

This commit resolves the issue by re-introducing shared mempools as
the default memory behaviour in OVS DPDK but also refactors the memory
configuration code to allow for per port mempools.

This patch adds a new global config option, per-port-memory, that
controls the enablement of per port mempools for DPDK devices.

    ovs-vsctl set Open_vSwitch . other_config:per-port-memory=true

This value defaults to false; to enable per port memory support,
this field should be set to true when setting other global parameters
on init (such as "dpdk-socket-mem", for example). Changing the value at
runtime is not supported, and requires restarting the vswitch
daemon.

The mempool sweep functionality is also replaced with the
sweep functionality from OVS 2.9 found in commits

c77f692 (netdev-dpdk: Free mempool only when no in-use mbufs.)
a7fb0a4 (netdev-dpdk: Add mempool reuse/free debug.)

A new document to discuss the specifics of the memory models and example
memory requirement calculations is also added.

Signed-off-by: Ian Stokes <ian.stokes@intel.com>
Acked-by: Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Tiago Lam <tiago.lam@intel.com>
Tested-by: Tiago Lam <tiago.lam@intel.com>

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/vswitchd/vswitch.xml b/vswitchd/vswitch.xml
index 76094852d..2ada246bd 100644
--- a/vswitchd/vswitch.xml
+++ b/vswitchd/vswitch.xml
@@ -360,6 +360,23 @@
         </p>
       </column>
 
+      <column name="other_config" key="per-port-memory"
+              type='{"type": "boolean"}'>
+        <p>
+          By default OVS DPDK uses a shared memory model wherein devices
+          that have the same MTU and socket values can share the same
+          mempool. Setting this value to <code>true</code> changes this
+          behaviour. Per port memory allow DPDK devices to use private
+          memory per device. This can provide greater transparency as
+          regards memory usage but potentially at the cost of greater memory
+          requirements.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Changing this value requires restarting the daemon if dpdk-init has
+          already been set to true.
+        </p>
+      </column>
+
       <column name="other_config" key="tx-flush-interval"
               type='{"type": "integer",
                      "minInteger": 0, "maxInteger": 1000000}'>