netdev - Re: [RFC v2: Patch 1/3] net: hand off skb list to other cpu to submit to upper layer

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Date:	Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:08:26 +0000
From:	Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@...arflare.com>
To:	"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@...ux.intel.com>
Cc:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, herbert@...dor.apana.org.au,
	jesse.brandeburg@...el.com, shemminger@...tta.com,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: [RFC v2: Patch 1/3] net: hand off skb list to other cpu to
	submit to upper layer

On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 16:16 +0800, Zhang, Yanmin wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 12:13 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
[...]
> >  and just use the hash function on the
> > NIC.
> Sorry. I can't understand what the hash function of NIC is. Perhaps NIC hardware has something
> like hash function to decide the RX queue number based on SRC/DST?

Yes, that's exactly what they do.  This feature is sometimes called
Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) which is Microsoft's name for it.  Microsoft
requires Windows drivers performing RSS to provide the hash value to the
networking stack, so Linux drivers for the same hardware should be able
to do so too.

> >  Have you considered this for forwarding too?
> Yes. originally, I plan to add a tx_num under the same sysfs directory, so admin could
> define that all packets received from a RX queue should be sent out from a specific TX queue.

The choice of TX queue can be based on the RX hash so that configuration
is usually unnecessary.

> So struct sk_buff->queue_mapping would be a union of 2 sub-members, rx_num and tx_num. But
> sk_buff->queue_mapping is just a u16 which is a small type. We might use the most-significant
> bit of sk_buff->queue_mapping as a flag as rx_num and tx_num wouldn't exist at the
> same time.
> 
> >  The trick here would
> > be to try to avoid reordering inside streams as far as possible,
> It's not to solve reorder issue. The start point is 10G NIC is very fast. We need some cpu
> work on packet receiving dedicately. If they work on other things, NIC might drop packets
> quickly.

Aggressive power-saving causes far greater latency than context-
switching under Linux.  I believe most 10G NICs have large RX FIFOs to
mitigate against this.  Ethernet flow control also helps to prevent
packet loss.

> The sysfs interface is just to facilitate NIC drivers. If there is no the sysfs interface,
> driver developers need implement it with parameters which are painful.
[...]

Or through the ethtool API, which already has some multiqueue control
operations.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare Communications
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.

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