netdev - Re: [PATCH 10/13] tg3: Increase the PCI MRRS

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Date:	Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:20:10 -0800
From:	"Matt Carlson" <mcarlson@...adcom.com>
To:	"David Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>
cc:	netdev@...r.kernel.org, andy@...yhouse.net, mchan@...adcom.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 10/13] tg3: Increase the PCI MRRS

On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 21:21 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> From: "Matt Carlson" <mcarlson@...adcom.com>
> Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:39:01 -0800
> 
> > Previous devices hardcoded the PCI Maximum Read Request Size to 4K.  To
> > better comply with the PCI spec, the hardware now defaults the MRRS to
> > 512 bytes.  This will yield poor driver performance if left untouched.
> > This patch increases the MRRS to 4K on driver initialization.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Matt Carlson <mcarlson@...adcom.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Michael Chan <mchan@...adcom.com>
> 
> I've applied this patch, but...
> 
> I sense that the PCI spec wants devices to use an MRRS value of 512 in
> order to get better fairness on a PCI-E segment amongst multiple
> devices.
> 
> From that perspective, jacking up the MRRS to 4096 unilaterally seems
> like a very bad idea.  If this was necessary for good performance, I'm
> sure the PCI spec folks would have choosen a higher value.
> 
> Or is this some tg3 specific performance issue?

Keeping the MRRS at 512 introduces DMA latencies that effectively
prevent us from achieving linerate.  With a packet size of ~1.5K and the
MRRS at 512 bytes, the DMA will be broken into at least 3 DMA reads.
Each DMA read takes ~1usec to initiate.  It is this overhead that starts
to cut into total throughput.

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