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    virtio-console downgrade virtio-pci-blk performance

    Posted on

    Hi all,

    We found an significant performance downgrade on disk I/O performance after virtio-console module installation.

    This situation exists in nearly all Qemu versions and all Linux
    (CentOS7, Fedora 28, Ubuntu 18.04) distros.

    This is a disk cmd:
    -drive file=iscsi://127.0.0.1:3260/iqn.2016-02.com.test:system:fl-iscsi/1,format=raw,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,cache=none,aio=native
    -device virtio-blk-pci,scsi=off,bus=pci.0,addr=0x6,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1,write-cache=on

    This is the FIO test case:
    [global]
    ioengine=libaio
    iodepth=128
    runtime=120
    time_based
    direct=1

    [randwrite-a-256k-seq]
    stonewall
    bs=4k
    filename=/dev/vdb
    rw=randwrite

    If I add "-device
    virtio-serial-pci,id=virtio-serial0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5 ", the virtio
    disk 4k iops (randread/randwrite) would downgrade from 60k to 40k.

    Inside guest VM, if I rmmod virtio-console, the performance will back to normal.

    Any idea about this issue? I don't know this is a qemu issue or kernel issue. Feel free to let me know if further evidence is needed to isolate root cause.

    Thanks in advance!

    Thanks and Best Regards,
    Alex

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