Date:	Tue, 1 May 2007 11:27:58 -0700
From:	"Waskiewicz Jr, Peter P" <peter.p.waskiewicz.jr@...el.com>
To:	<hadi@...erus.ca>
Cc:	"Patrick McHardy" <kaber@...sh.net>,
	"Stephen Hemminger" <shemminger@...ux-foundation.org>,
	<netdev@...r.kernel.org>, <jgarzik@...ox.com>,
	"cramerj" <cramerj@...el.com>,
	"Kok, Auke-jan H" <auke-jan.h.kok@...el.com>,
	"Leech, Christopher" <christopher.leech@...el.com>,
	<davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: RE: [PATCH] IPROUTE: Modify tc for new PRIO multiqueue behavior

> On Fri, 2007-27-04 at 08:45 -0700, Waskiewicz Jr, Peter P wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-26-04 at 09:30 -0700, Waskiewicz Jr, Peter P wrote:
> 
> 
> > I agree, that to be fair for discussing the code that you 
> should look 
> > at the patches before drawing conclusions.
> > I appreciate the fact you have
> > a different idea for your approach for multiqueue, but 
> without having 
> > specific things to discuss in terms of implementation, I'm 
> at a loss 
> > for what you want to see done.  These patches have been released in 
> > the community for a few months now, and the general 
> approach has been 
> > accepted for the most part.
> > 
> 
> Sorry, I (was too busy with real work and) wasnt keeping up 
> with netdev.
> And stop whining please if you want me to comment; that is 
> such an important part of the network subsystem - so your 
> patches need more scrutiny because their impact is huge. And 
> i know that subsystem enough that i dont need to look at your 
> patches to know you are going to be hit by a big truck (by 
> just observing you are crossing a busy highway on foot).

I don't know how you think I'm whining here.  I'm just expecting people
that make comments on patches submitted to actually look at them if they
wish to make comments.  Otherwise, I have no idea what to fix if you
don't give context.  The basis of your criticism and comments should be
based on the code, and not be influenced that my approach is different
than your approach.  If you have a better approach, then please post it
so the community can decide.  My patches have been under discussion for
a few months, and the general approach has been fairly well-accepted.
The comments that David, Patrick, and Thomas have given were more on
implementation, which have been fixed and are what you see today.  So if
you don't like my approach, then please provide an alternative.

> 
> > That being said, my approach was to provide an API for drivers to 
> > implement multiqueue support.  We originally went with an 
> idea to do 
> > the multiqueue support in the driver.
> 
> That is certainly one (brute) approach. This way you meet the 
> requirement of not changing anything on the qdisc level (user 
> or kernel level). But i am not sure you need an "API" perse.

Please explain why this is a brute force approach.  Today, netdev gives
drivers an API to manage the device queue (dev->queue_lock).  I extended
this to provide a management API to manage each queue on a device.  This
to me makes complete sense; why hide the fact a device has multiple
queues from the kernel?  I don't understand your comments here.

>  
> > However, many questions came up that
> > were answered by pulling things into the qdisc / netdev layer.
> > Specifically, if all the multiqueue code is in the driver, 
> how would 
> > you ensure one flow of traffic (say on queue 0) doesn't 
> interfere with 
> > another flow (say on queue 1)?  If queue 1 on your NIC ran out of 
> > descriptors, the driver will set dev->queue_lock to 
> __LINK_STATE_XOFF, 
> > which will cause all entry points into the scheduler to 
> stop (i.e. - 
> > no more packets going to the NIC).  That will also shut 
> down queue 0.  
> > As soon as that happens, that is not multiqueue network 
> support.  The 
> > other question was how to classify traffic.  We're 
> proposing to use tc 
> > filters to do it, since the user has control over that; having 
> > flexibility to meet different network needs is a plus.  We 
> had tried 
> > doing queue selection in the driver, and it killed 
> performance.  Hence 
> > why we pulled it into the qdisc layer.
> 
> at some point when my thinking was evolving, I had similar 
> thoughts crossing my mind, but came to the conclusion i was 
> thinking too hard when i started (until i started to 
> look/think about the OLPC mesh network challenge).
> 
> Lets take baby steps so we can make this a meaningful discussion.
> Ignore wireless for a second and talk just about simple wired 
> interfaces; we can then come back to wireless in a later discussion.
> 
> For the first baby steps, lets look at strict prio which if i 
> am not mistaken is what you e1000 NICs support; but even that 
> were not the case, strict prio covers a huge amount of 
> multi-queue capability. 
> For simplicity, lets pick something with just 2 hardware 
> queues; PH and PL (PH stands for High Prio and PL low prio). 
> With me so far?

E1000 is not strict prio scheduling, rather, it is round-robin.  This
question was posed by Patrick McHardy on netdev and I answered it 2
weeks ago.

> 
> I am making the assumptions that: 
> a) you understand the basics of strict prio scheduling
> b) You have configured strict prio in the qdisc level and the 
> hardware levels to be synced i.e if your hardware is capable 
> of only strict prio, then you better use a matching strict 
> prio qdisc (and not another qdisc like HTB etc). If your 
> hardware is capable 2 queues, you better have your qdisc with 
> only two bands.

I disagree.  If you read Patrick's comments, using strict PRIO in
software and in hardware will probably give you results you don't want.
Why do 2 layers of QoS?  If your hardware has a hardware-based QoS, then
you should have a generic round-robin (unassuming) qdisc above it.  I
don't understand why you would ever want to do 2 layers of
prioritization; this is just unnecessary work for the CPU to be doing.
And if you see how my patches to PRIO are working, you'd see that it
allows a user to choose as many bands as he/she wants, and they will be
assigned to the underlying hardware queues.  This is very similar to the
mapping that the 802.1p spec calls out for how to map many priorities to
fewer queues.

> c) If you programmed a TOS, DSCP , IEEE 802.1p to go to qdisc 
> queue PH via some classifier, then you will make sure that 
> packets from qdisc PH end up in hardware queue PH.
> 
> Not following #b and #c means it is a misconfiguration; i 
> hope we can agree on that. i.e you need to have both the 
> exact qdisc that maps to your hardware qdisc as well as 
> synced configuration between the two layers.

Please see my comments above.  Restricting any configuration of a
scheduler like this to a user is undesirable; if a user wants to
configure something that could shoot themselves in the foot, then that
should be their problem.

> 
> Ok, so you ask when to shut down the hw tx path?
> 1) Lets say you had so many PH packets coming into the 
> hardware PH and that causes the PH-ring to fill up. At that 
> point you shutdown the hw-tx path. So what are the 
> consequences? none - newer PH packets still come in and queue 
> at the qdisc level. Newer PL packets? who cares PH is more 
> important - so they can rot in qdisc level...
> 2) Lets say you had so many PL packets coming into the 
> hardware PL and that causes the PL-ring to fill up. At that 
> point you shutdown the hw-tx path. So what are the 
> consequences? none - newer PH packets still come in and queue 
> at the qdisc level; the PL packets causing the tx path to 
> shut down can be considered to be "already sent to the wire".
> And if there was any PH packets to begin with, the qdisc PL 
> packets would never have been able to shut down the PL-ring.

How do packets keep getting transmitted from the qdisc in this example?
As soon as the hardware-tx path is shut down in your example
(netif_stop_queue() is called on the netdev, shutting down the device
queue), no packets will flow into qdisc_run():

>From include/net/pkt_sched.h:

static inline void qdisc_run(struct net_device *dev)
{
        if (!netif_queue_stopped(dev) &&
            !test_and_set_bit(__LINK_STATE_QDISC_RUNNING, &dev->state))
                __qdisc_run(dev);
}

If that queue is stopped, the qdisc will never get called to run and
->dequeue(), and hard_start_xmit() will never be called.  So in your
example, if your PL-ring fills up, you're going to shut down the entry
point for your PH to the driver.  As soon as you do this, multiqueue is
still single-queue.  The effort here is to make the kernel
multiqueue-capable, not the devices.

> 
> So what am i saying?
> You dont need to touch the qdisc code in the kernel. You just 
> need to instrument a mapping between qdisc-queues and 
> hw-rings. i.e You need to meet #b and #c above.
> Both #b and #c are provable via queueing and feedback control theory. 
> Since you said you like implementation and you are coming to 
> OLS (which i stopped attending last 2 years), visit the 
> ottawa canals not far from the venue of OLS. Watch how they 
> open the different cascaded gates to allow the boats in. It 
> is the same engineering challenge as you are trying to solve here.

I'm very familiar with the Rideau Canal system, and this is not what I'm
trying to solve.  What would be analagous to my goal is the lockmaster
would direct different flows of boats into multiple lock entrypoints,
based on some criteria.  What you're saying is how to put all packets
into one bucket, and then select one at a time for dequeueing, which
still allows those different packets to interfere with each other.  So
perhaps you're not completely grasping what it is I'm trying to
implement.

> 
> I showed 2 queus in a strict prio setup, you can show N 
> queues for that scheduler. You can then extend it to other 
> schedulers, both work and non-work conserving.
> 
> If what i said above is coherent, come back with a counter 
> example/use case or we can discuss a different scheduler of 
> your choice.

I'd rather you base any argument for or against this code with examples
from the code that you do or don't like.  Making the statement early on
that you haven't followed the netdev discussion on this, and that you
have your own approach (and therefore don't want to sway your thinking
by looking at these patches) is insulting when you comment on what it is
we've done in these patches.  I appreciate the feedback, but it isn't
really relevant because it isn't what we're proposing here.  Either
review the code and make comments, or propose and post an alternative
solution for multiqueue support so I and the rest of netdev can
understand specifically where we differ in our approached.

Thanks,
-PJ Waskiewicz
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