scsi: lpfc: Mitigate high memory pre-allocation by SCSI-MQ

When SCSI-MQ is enabled, the SCSI-MQ layers will do pre-allocation of MQ
resources based on shost values set by the driver. In newer cases of the
driver, which attempts to set nr_hw_queues to the cpu count, the
multipliers become excessive, with a single shost having SCSI-MQ
pre-allocation reaching into the multiple GBytes range.  NPIV, which
creates additional shosts, only multiply this overhead. On lower-memory
systems, this can exhaust system memory very quickly, resulting in a system
crash or failures in the driver or elsewhere due to low memory conditions.

After testing several scenarios, the situation can be mitigated by limiting
the value set in shost->nr_hw_queues to 4. Although the shost values were
changed, the driver still had per-cpu hardware queues of its own that
allowed parallelization per-cpu.  Testing revealed that even with the
smallish number for nr_hw_queues for SCSI-MQ, performance levels remained
near maximum with the within-driver affiinitization.

A module parameter was created to allow the value set for the nr_hw_queues
to be tunable.

Signed-off-by: Dick Kennedy <dick.kennedy@broadcom.com>
Signed-off-by: James Smart <jsmart2021@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Ewan D. Milne <emilne@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
4 files changed