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Re: [Xen-users] Release 0.9.5 of GPL PV Drivers for Windows

I'm sorry to react on a random posted message, I just subscribed this mailinglist. I've currently installed the 0.9.6 drivers which are a major step forward since the last time I tried your drivers (0.8.x). The sustained transferrate of the scsi driver might not be as good as it could be, but on the other hand I am very impressed by it's I/O speed measured with IOMeter. It even outperformed the closed-source driver found in XenServer 4.0.1! Well that test was run on possibly slower disks, but same CPU, RAM and 4xRAID5 SATA.

Also "reallife" performance, as in just using the system, is at least to call impressive. Very responsive, definitely enterprise ready. There is just one thing I'm struggling with. Somehow the Tx network traffic (seen from the HVM) is to DomU's and other nodes on the lan is very slow. On the other hand it's just fine to Dom0 (about 1Gbit/s). Below are some measurements done with iperf, all executed from the Windows HVM:

#iperf -c LinuxPV-DomU -l 1M -w 1M
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.25, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 1.00 MByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[1884] local 192.168.1.65 port 1495 connected with 192.168.1.25 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1884]  0.0-35.1 sec  2.00 MBytes   478 Kbits/sec

#iperf -c Dom0 -l 1M -w 1M
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.90, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 1.00 MByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[1884] local 192.168.1.65 port 1496 connected with 192.168.1.90 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1884]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.21 GBytes  1.04 Gbits/sec

#iperf -c OtherLanHost100mbit -l 1M -w 1M
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.3, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 1.00 MByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[1884] local 192.168.1.65 port 1497 connected with 192.168.1.3 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1884]  0.0-10.1 sec  46.0 MBytes  38.3 Mbits/sec

Running these tests from LinuxPV DomU <-> LinuxPV DomU gives about 500-700mbit. Somehow this only affects the HVM's outgoing traffic, running iperf as a server on the Windows HVM and testing it from LinuxPV DomU gives me this result:

test1:/tmp# iperf -c WindowsHVM -l 0.5M -w 0.5M
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.65, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 1.00 MByte (WARNING: requested   512 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.25 port 37641 connected with 192.168.1.65 port 5001
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec    599 MBytes    502 Mbits/sec

I tried enabling/disabling tx checksumming with ethtool on the HVM's vif interface, changed the Xen Net Device Driver options, all with no luck.

These tests were performed on a AMD Opteron 1210 1.8ghz, HVM and DomU's running 512MB RAM and Dom0 running on Debian Etch with Xen 3.2.0 from backports. The tested Windows HVM is running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 EN 32-bit set to 1 vcpu with the latest GPL PV drivers (0.9.6) installed. The onboard NIC is a Broadcom BCM5721, not the greatest, but that shouldn't matter in this case. The Linux PV's are performing well, so there has to be something wrong with the GPL PV drivers or settings. Any suggestion?

Joost

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