VPP/AArch64

Meeting Details

Weekly on Wednesdays, 8-9am PT. FD.io Zoom Meeting room

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IRC Channel

#fdio-arm on freenode.net

Recent Patches

Map SVM regions at a sane offset on arm64	Merged 11/10	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9342/
bfd tests fix	Merged 11/07	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9243/
debian packaging fix	Merged 11/06	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9239/
lb test fix	Merged 10/31	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9067/
conditional x86intrin.h inclusion	Merged 10/25	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8952/
fix test_lb_ip4_gre6() cleanup (not enough to fix the tests completely)	Merged 10/24	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8992/
null-terminate some formatted string	Merged 10/20	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8922/
lb plugin - fix format() type mismatches	Merged 10/16	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8755/
Use AESNI=y only on x86_64 machines	Merged 10/14	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8622/
Improved arm64 chip detection	Merged 09/11	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8372/
Native arm64 build: dpdk/Makefile change	Merged 08/31	https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/8228/

Might want to have a look at this patch which adds "make config"

https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9200/

Also this other patch proposal (probably not as complete) allows to toggle off some parts of the code such as libvom, and therefore allows compilation on small systems

https://gerrit.fd.io/r/#/c/9186/

Known Issues

Compilation may fail on systems with less than 1GB memory per core. One workaround is to search for -j in build-root/Makefile and multiply by 1 instead of 2.

GCC 5.3.x ICEs during FP register allocation. Please use GCC 5.4+.

Unit tests

Cmd	Status / Issues
make test	1
make test-all	1
make test-debug	1, 2
make test-all-debug	1, 2

Timing consideration on platform: hierofalcon with cortex A57 & fedora26

Cmd	Timing
make build	~12 min
make build-release	~16 min
make test	~20 min
make test-debug	~23 min

Issues

1. Random initialization failures; current workaround is to disable ASLR: sysctl -w kernel.randomize_va_space=0. Brian to upstream patch for this.

2. Some tests need timeout finetuning:

Example test_cflow_packet:

assertAlmostEqual(cflow[IPFIX].exportTime, nowUTC, delta=5)

Test order

Some tests are not meant to be played alone.

For example the test_l2bd_arp_term_\d+ list

• test_1: create 5 hosts
• test_2: delete 3 of the hosts created by test_1

...

Those tests should be played grouped. For example in the case above ;

# works
make test TEST=*.TestL2bdArpTerm.*
# does not work
make test V=1 TEST=*.TestL2bdArpTerm.test_l2bd_arp_term_01
make test V=1 TEST=*.TestL2bdArpTerm.test_l2bd_arp_term_02
...

Packaging

Distro	Cmd	Status
Fedora 26 (Server Edition)	make pkg-rpm	OK
Ubuntu 17.04	make pkg-deb	?
Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS	make pkg-deb	OK

CSIT func & perf

TODO

AArch64 Porting & Tuning

Support multiple cache line sizes per architecture. AArch64 is currently hard coded to 128B. For native build, inspect ARMv8 Main ID Register in Makefile and pass cache line size as compiler option, e.g. -DCACHE_LINE_SIZE=128.

Investigate "show cpu" output and Arm CPU feature detection (AES, SHA1, SHA2, CRC32, ATOMICS) via hwcaps. src/vppinfra/cpu.[ch]

Review use of Arm architected timer in src/vppinfra/time.[ch]

Use ISB or YIELD in src/vppinfra/smp.h

Use REV in src/vppinfra/byte_order.h

Review use of __sync_xxx/__atomic_xxx builtins to ensure correct memory ordering on non-TSO machines.

Investigate hash performance (CRC32 vs xxhash) e.g. in src/vppinfra/bihash_8_8.h. Dependent on Arm CPU feature detection.

Investigate memcpy performance (src/vppinfra/string.h); both inlined-by-compiler and libc versions.

Investigate dual/quad loop tuning, e.g. l2_forward().

SIMD

• CLIB_HAVE_VEC128 also covers 256-bit. Add CLIB_HAVE_VEC256?
• ixge.[ch] - 128-bit vector types with plain C. Needs to be enabled.
• mheap.c - requires NEON implementation of is_equal
• hash.h - requires NEON implementation of irotate
• vnet_classify.h - 128-bit vector types with plain C. Needs to be enabled.
• vhost-user.c - SSE4.2 only. Implement range search using NEON.
• ip4_mtrie.h - 128-bit vector types with plain C. Needs to be enabled.

Meeting Minutes

11/8/2017

• Unit tests
  • Tests pass except for random initialization failures
  • Need to hear back from upstream about Extended unit tests
• Should we run plugins such as NSH SFC?
• Hardware to lab
  • Huawei h/w stalled
  • 3x ThunderX shipping to FD.io lab
• CSIT replication
  • Cavium replicating on ThunderX2; getting started
• Let's track our work in Jira; Brian to migrate tasks to Jira

10/25/2017

• Gabriel working on vpp init failure in linux_pci_init()
• Kumar to check with GeorgeZ on Huawei boards shipped to CSIT; need to verify tests also on this environment (package versions from distro)
• Brian to check whether anything else needs to be done besides 'make test' for upstream enablement