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Issues Related to RPC-over-RDMA Internode Round-trips
draft-dnoveck-nfsv4-rpcrdma-rtissues-00

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draft-dnoveck-nfsv4-rpcrdma-rtissues-00
Network File System Version 4                                  D. Noveck
Internet-Draft                                                       HPE
Intended status: Informational                            April 17, 2016
Expires: October 19, 2016

         Issues Related to RPC-over-RDMA Internode Round-trips
                draft-dnoveck-nfsv4-rpcrdma-rtissues-00

Abstract

   As currently designed and implemented, the RPC-over-RDMA protocol
   requires use of multiple internode round trips to process many common
   operations.  For example, NFS READ or WRITE operations require use of
   three internode round trips.  This document looks at this issue and
   discusses what can and what should be done to address it, both within
   the context of an extensible version of RPC-over-RDMA and possibly
   outside that framework.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on October 19, 2016.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of

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   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.2.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Review of the Current Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Troublesome Requests  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Request Processing Details  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Near-term Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.1.  Target Performance  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.2.  Message Continuation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.3.  Send-based DDP  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.4.  Feature Synergy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   4.  Possible Future Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12

1.  Preliminaries

1.1.  Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

1.2.  Introduction

   When many common operations are performed using RPC-over-RDMA,
   additional inter-node round-trip latencies are required to take
   advantage of the performance benefits provided by RDMA Functionality.

   While the latencies involved are generally small, they are a reason
   for concern for two reasons.

   o  With the ongoing improvement of persistent memory technologies,
      such internode latencies, being fixed, can be expected to consume
      an increasing portion of the total latency required for processing
      NFS requests using RPC-over-RDMA.

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   o  High-performance transfers using NFS may be needed outside of a
      machine-room environment.  As RPC-over-RDMA is used in networks of
      campus and metropolitan scale, the internode round-trip time of
      sixteen microseconds per mile becomes an issue.

   Given this background, round trips beyond the minimum necessary need
   to be justified by corresponding benefits.  If they are not, work
   needs to be done to eliminate those excess round trips.

   We are going to look at the existing situation with regard to round
   trip latency and make some suggestions as to how the issue might be
   best addressed.  We will consider things that could be done in the
   near future and also explore further possibilities that would require
   a longer-term approach to be adopted.

2.  Review of the Current Situation

2.1.  Troublesome Requests

   We will be looking at four sorts of situations:

   o  An RPC operation involving Direct Data Placement of request data
      (e.g., an NFSv3 WRITE or corresponding NFSv4 COMPOUND).

   o  An RPC operation involving Direct Data Placement of response data
      (e.g., an NFSv3 READ or corresponding NFSv4 COMPOUND).

   o  An RPC operation where the request data is longer than the inline
      buffer limit.

   o  An RPC operation where the response data is longer than the inline
      buffer limit.

   We will survey the resulting latencies in an RPC-over-RDMA Version
   One environment in Section 2.2 below.

2.2.  Request Processing Details

   We'll start with the case of a request involving direct placement of
   request data.  Processing proceeds as described below.  Although we
   are focused on internode latency, the time to perform a request also
   includes such things as interrupt latency, overhead involved in
   interacting with the RNIC, and the time for the server to execute the
   requested operation.

   o  First, the memory to be accessed remotely is registered.  This is
      a local operation.

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   o  Once the registration has been done, the initial send of the
      request can proceed.  Since this is in the context of connected
      operation, there is an internode round-trip involved.  However,
      the next step can proceed after the initial transmission is
      received.  As a result, only the responder-bound side of the
      transmission contributes to overall operation latency.

   o  The responder, after being notified of the receipt of the request,
      uses RDMA READ to fetch the bulk data.  This involves an internode
      round-trip latency.  The responder then needs to be notified of
      the completion of the explicit RDMA operation

   o  The responder (after doing the actual operation) sends the
      response.  Again, as this is in the context of connected
      operation, there is an internode round-trip involved.  However,
      the next step can proceed after the initial transmission is
      received by the requester.

   o  The requester, after being notified of the receipt of the
      response, deregisters the memory originally registered before the
      request was issued.  This is also a local operation.

   To summarize, if we exclude the actual server execution of the
   request, the latency consists of two round-trip internode latencies
   plus two-responder-side interrupt latencies plus one requester-side
   interrupt latency plus any necessary registration/de-registration
   overhead.  This is in contrast to a request not using explicit RDMA
   operations in which there is a single inter-node round-trip latency
   and one interrupt latency on the requester and the responder.

   The processing of the other sorts of requests mentioned in
   Section 2.1 is very similar.

   o  The case of direct data placement of response data follows the
      same pattern.  The only difference is that the transfer of the
      bulk data is performed using RDMA WRITE, rather than RDMA READ.

   o  Handling of a long request is also similar to the above.  The
      memory associated with a position-zero read chunk is registered,
      transferred using RDMA READ, and deregistered.  As a result we
      have the same overhead and latency issues associated with the case
      of direct data placement, without the corresponding benefits.

   o  Handling of a long response is a mirror image in that RDMA WRITE
      is used, rather than RDMA READ.

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3.  Near-term Work

   We are going to consider how the latency issues discussed in
   Section 2 might be addressed in the context of an extensible version
   of RPC-over-RDMA, such as that proposed in [rpcrdmav2].

   In Section 3.1, we will establish a performance target for the
   troublesome requests, based on the performance of requests that do
   not involve long messages or direct data placement.

   We will then consider how extensions might be defined to bring
   latency and overhead for the requests discussed in Section 2.1 into
   line with those for other requests.  There will be two specific
   classes of requests to address:

   o  Those that do not involve direct data placement will be addressed
      in Section 3.2.  In this case, there are no compensating benefits
      justifying the higher latency and overhead.

   o  The more complicated case of requests that do involve direct data
      placement is discussed in Section 3.3.  In this case, direct data
      placement could serve as a compensating benefit, and the important
      question to be addressed is whether Direct Data Placement can be
      effected without the additional round-trip latencies.

   The optional features to deal with each of the classes of messages
   discussed above could be implemented separately.  However, in the
   handling of RPCs with very large amounts of bulk data, the two
   features are synergistic.  This fact makes it desirable to define the
   features as part of the same extension.  See Section 3.4 for details.

3.1.  Target Performance

   As our target, we will look at the latency and overhead associated
   with other sorts of RPC requests, i.e. those that do not use DDP, and
   that have request and response messages which do fit within the
   buffer limit.

   Processing proceeds as follows:

   o  The initial send of the request is done.  Since this is in the
      context of connected operation, there is an internode round-trip
      involved.  However, the next step can proceed after the initial
      transmission is received.  As a result, only the responder-bound
      side of the transmission contributes to overall operation latency.

   o  The responder, after being notified of the receipt of the request,
      performs the requested operation and sends the reply.  As in the

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      case of the request, there is an internode round-trip involved.
      However, the request can be considered complete upon receipt of
      the requester-bound transmission.  The responder-bound
      acknowledgment does not contribute to request latency.

   In this case there is only a single internode round-trip latency
   necessary to effect the RPC.  Total request latency includes this
   round-trip latency plus interrupt latency on the requester and
   responder, plus the time for the responder to actually perform the
   requested operation.

   Thus the delta between the operations discussed in Section 2 and our
   baseline consists of:

   o  One additional internode round-trip latency.

   o  One additional instance of responder-side interrupt latency

   o  The additional overhead necessary to do memory registration and
      deregistration.

3.2.  Message Continuation

   Using multiple RPC-over-RDMA transmissions, in sequence, to send a
   single RPC message avoids the additional latency associated with the
   use of explicit RDMA operations to transfer position-zero read chunks
   or reply chunks.

   Although transfer of a single request or reply in N transmissions
   will involve N+1 internode latencies, overall request latency is not
   increased as it currently is, by requiring that operations involving
   multiple nodes be serialized.

   As an illustration, let's consider the case of a request involving a
   response consisting of two RPC-over-RDMA transmissions.  Even though
   each of these transmissions is acknowledged, that acknowledgement
   does not contribute to request latency.  The second transmission can
   be received by the requester and acted upon without waiting for
   either acknowledgment.

   This situation would require multiple receive-side interrupts but it
   is unlikely to result in extended interrupt latency.  With 1K sends
   (Version One), the second receive will complete about 200 nanoseconds
   after the first assuming a 40Gb/s transmission rate.  Given likely
   interrupt latencies, the first interrupt routine would be able to
   note that the completion of the second receive had already occurred.

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3.3.  Send-based DDP

   In order to effect proper placement of request or reply data within
   the context of individual RPC-over-RDMA transmissions, receive
   buffers must be structured to accommodate this function

   To illustrate the considerations that lead clients and servers to
   choose particular buffer structures, we will use as examples, the
   cases of NFS READs and WRITEs of 8K data blocks (or the corresponding
   NFSv4 COMPOUNDs).

   In such cases, the client and server need to have the DDP-eligible
   bulk data placed in 8K-aligned 8K buffer segments.  Rather than being
   transferred in separate transmissions using explicit RDMA operations,
   a message can be sent so that bulk data is received into an
   appropriate buffer segment.  In this case, it will be excised from
   the XDR payload stream, just as it is in the case of existing DDP
   facilities.

   Consider a server expecting write requests which are mostly X bytes
   long, exclusive of an 8K bulk data area.  In this case the payload
   stream will be less than X bytes and will fit in buffer segment
   devoted to that purpose.  The bulk data needs to be placed in the
   subsequent buffer segment in order to align it properly, i.e. with 8K
   alignment in the DDP target buffer.  In order to place the data
   appropriately, the sender (in the case, the client needs) to add
   padding of length X-Y bytes where Y is the length of payload stream
   for the current request.  The case of reads is exactly the same
   except that the sender adding the padding is the server.

   To provide send-based DDP as an RPC-over-RDMA extension, the
   framework defined in [xcharext] could be used.  A new "transport
   characteristic" could be defined which allowed a participant to
   expose the structure of his receive buffers and to identify the
   buffer segments capable of being used as DDP targets.  In addition, a
   new optional message header would have to be defined.  It would be
   defined to provide:

   o  A way to designate DDP-eligible data item as corresponding to
      target buffer segments, rather than memory registered for RDMA.

   o  A way to indicate to the responder that it should place DDP-
      eligible data items in DDP-targetable buffer segments, rather than
      in memory registered for RDMA.

   o  A way to designate a limited portion of an RPC-over-RDMA
      transmission as constituting the payload stream.

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3.4.  Feature Synergy

   While message continuation and send-based DDP each address an
   important class of commonly used messages, their combination allows
   simpler handling of some important classes of messages:

   o  READs and WRITEs transferring larger IOs

   o  COMPOUNDs containing multiple IO operations.

   o  Operations whose associated payload stream is longer than the
      typical value.

   To accommodate these situations, it seems that the definition of the
   headers for message continuation need to interact with data
   structures for send-based DDP as follows:

   o  The header type for the message starting a chained group contains
      DDP-directing structures which support both send-based DDP as well
      as DDP using Explicit RDMA operations.

   o  Buffer references for Send-based DDP should be relative to the
      start of the transmission group and should allow transitions
      between buffer segments in different receive buffers.

   o  The header type for messages within a chained group should not
      have DDP-related fields but should rely on the initial message of
      the group for DDP-related functions.

   o  The portion of each received transmission devoted to the payload
      stream should be part of the header for each message within a
      chained group.  The payload stream for the message as a whole
      should be the concatenation of those for each transmission.

4.  Possible Future Development

   Although the reduction of explicit RDMA operation reduces the number
   of inter-node round trips and eliminates sequences of operations in
   which multiple round-trip latencies are serialized with server
   interrupt latencies, the use of connected operations means that
   round-trip latencies will always be present, since each message is
   acknowledged.

   One avenue that has been considered is use of unreliable-datagram
   (UD) transmission in environments where the "unreliable" transmission
   is sufficiently reliable that RPC replay can deal with a very low
   rate of message loss.  For example, UD in Infiniband specifies a low

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   enough rate of frame loss to make this a viable approach,
   particularly given NFSv4.1's EOS support.

   With this sort of arrangement, request latency is still the same.
   However, since the acknowledgements are not serving any substantial
   function, it is tempting to consider removing them, as they do take
   up some transmission bandwidth, that might be used otherwise, if the
   protocol were to reach the goal of effectively using the underlying
   medium.

   The size of such wasted transmission bandwidth depends on the average
   messages size and many implementation considerations regarding how
   acknowledgments are done.  In any case, given expected message sizes,
   the wasted transmission bandwidth will be very small.

   When RPC messages are quite small, acknowledgments may be of concern.
   However, in that situation, a better response would be transfer
   multiple RPC messages within a single RPC-over-RDMA transmission.

   When multiple RPC messages are combined into a single transmission,
   the overhead of interfacing with the RNIC, particularly the interrupt
   handling overhead, is amortized over multiple RPC messages.

   Although this technique is quite outside the spirit of existing RPC-
   over-RDMA implementations, it appears possible to define new header
   types capable of supporting this sort of transmission, using the
   extension framework described in [rpcrdmav2].

5.  Summary

   We've examined the issue of round-trip latency and concluded:

   o  That the number of round trips per se is not as important as the
      contribution of any extra round-trips to overall request latency.

   o  That the latency issue can be addressed using the extension
      mechanism provided for in [rpcrdmav2].

   As it seems that the features sketched out could put internode
   latencies for a large class of requests back to the baseline value
   for the RPC paradigm, more detailed definition of the required
   extension functionality is in order.

   We've also looked at round-trips at the physical level, in that
   acknowledgments are sent in circumstances where there is no obvious
   need for them.  With regard to these, we have concluded:

   o  That these acknowledgements do not contribute to request latency.

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   o  That while UD transmission can remove acknowledgements of limited
      value, the performance benefits are not sufficient to justify the
      disruption that this would entail.

   o  That issues with transmission bandwidth overhead in a small-
      message environment are better addressed by combining multiple RPC
      messages in a single RPC-over-RDMA transmission.  This is
      particularly so, because such a step is likely to reduce overhead
      in such environments as well

   As the features described involve the use of alternatives to explicit
   RDMA operations, in performing direct data placement and in
   transferring messages that are larger than the receive buffer limit,
   it is appropriate to understand the role that such operations are
   expected to have once the extensions discussed in this document are
   fully specified and implemented.

   It is important to note that these extensions are OPTIONAL and are
   expected to remain so, while support for explicit RDMA operations
   will remain an integral part of RPC-over-RDMA.

   Given this framework, the degree to which explicit RDMA operations
   will be used will reflect future implementation choices and needs.
   While we have been focusing on cases in which other options might be
   more efficient in some cases, it worth looking also at the cases in
   which explicit RDMA operations are likely to remain preferable:

   o  In some environments in which direct data placement to memory of a
      certain alignment does not meet application requirements and in
      which data needs to be read into a particular address on the
      client.  Also, large physically contiguous buffers may be required
      in some environments.  In these situations, send-based DDP is not
      an option.

   o  Where large transfers are to be done, there will be limits to the
      capacity of send-based DDP to provide the required functionality,
      since the basic pattern using send/receive is to allocate a pool
      of memory to contain receive buffers in advance of issuing
      requests.  While this issue can be mitigated by use of message
      continuation, tying up large numbers of credits for a single
      request can cause difficult issues as well.  As a result, send-
      based DDP may be restricted to "small" IO's although the
      definition of "small" in this context is inevitably somewhat
      elastic.

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6.  Security Considerations

   This document does not raise any security issues.

7.  IANA Considerations

   This document does not require any actions by IANA.

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [rfc5666bis]
              Lever, C., Ed., Simpson, W., and T. Talpey, "Remote Direct
              Memory Access Transport for Remote Procedure Call", April
              2016, <http://www.ietf.org/id/
              draft-ietf-nfsv4-rfc5666bis-05.txt>.

              Work in progress.

8.2.  Informative References

   [RFC5666]  Talpey, T. and B. Callaghan, "Remote Direct Memory Access
              Transport for Remote Procedure Call", RFC 5666,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5666, January 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5666>.

   [rpcrdmav2]
              Lever, C., Ed. and D. Noveck, "RPC-over-RDMA Version Two",
              April 2016, <http://www.ietf.org/id/
              draft-cel-nfsv4-rpcrdma-version-two-00.txt>.

              Work in progress.

   [xcharext]
              Noveck, D., "RPC-over-RDMA Extension to Manage Transport
              Characterisitcs", April 2016, <http://www.ietf.org/id/
              draft-dnoveck-nfsv4-rpcrdma-xcharext-00.txt>.

              Work in progress.

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Appendix A.  Acknowledgements

   The author gratefully acknowledges the work of Brent Callaghan and
   Tom Talpey producing the original RPC-over-RDMA Version One
   specification [RFC5666] and also Tom's work in helping to clarify
   that specification.

   The author also wishes to thank Chuck Lever for his work resurrecting
   NFS support for RDMA in [rfc5666bis], and for helpful discussion
   regarding RPC-over-RDMA latency issues.

Author's Address

   David Noveck
   Hewlett Packard Enterprise
   165 Dascomb Road
   Andover, MA  01810
   USA

   Phone: +1 781-572-8038
   Email: davenoveck@gmail.com

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