Comment 1 for bug 1551179

Revision history for this message
Sreekumar S (sreesiv) wrote :

The perf issue with TSO, GSO enabled spans across hypervisors and Linux SKUs.
Details can be seen https://kris.io/2015/10/01/kvm-network-performance-tso-and-gso-turn-it-off/

Redhat has issued advisory for RHEL6 for "Network performance issues" https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Virtualization_Host_Configuration_and_Guest_Installation_Guide/ch10s04.html

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/Virtualization_Deployment_and_Administration_Guide/ch10s04.html

Related Bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1202289

However later RHEL docs https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.5_Technical_Notes/kernel.html mentions some fixes which 'may' address this.

Anyway this seems to be an unreliable feature to be enabled, and the folks at Qemu are not in favor of changing the defaults to "Off" for these flags, which seems fair...
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-05/msg01165.html

So looking at this holistically I think, we should maintain the default behavior as is. But we can add a config option to disable these features on the interface/bridge for troubleshooting purposes.
If someone hits nw perf issue, they can turn these in config and have TSO, GSO, GRO etc. disabled.

I will work on this. Welcoming suggestions...