Date:	Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:09:46 -0700
From:	Jay Vosburgh <fubar@...ibm.com>
To:	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
cc:	"George B." <georgeb@...il.com>, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Network multiqueue question

Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com> wrote:

>Le jeudi 15 avril 2010 à 09:58 -0700, George B. a écrit :
>> I am in need of a little education on multiqueue and was wondering if
>> someone here might be able to help me.
>> 
>> Given intel igb network driver, it appears I can do something like:
>> 
>>  tc qdisc del dev eth0 root handle 1: multiq
>> 
>> which works and reports 4 bands:  dev eth0 root refcnt 4 bands 4/4
>> 
>> But our network is a little more complicated.  Above the ethernet we
>> have the bonding driver which is using mode 2 bonding with two
>> ethernet slaves.  Then we have vlans on the bond interface.  Our
>> production traffic is on a vlan and resource contention is an issue as
>> these are busy machines.
>> 
>> It is my understanding that the vlan driver became multiqueue aware in
>> 2.6.32 (we are currently using 2.6.31).
>> 
>> It would seem that the first thing the kernel would encounter with
>> traffic headed out would be the vlan interface, and then the bond
>> interface, and then the physical ethernet interface.  Is that correct?
>>  So with my kernel, I would seem to get no utility from multiq on the
>> ethernet interface if the vlan interface is going to be a
>> single-threaded bottleneck.  What about the bond driver?  Is it
>> currently multiqueue aware?
>> 
>> I am try to get some sort of logical picture of how all these things
>> interact with each other to get things a little more efficient and
>> reduce resource contention in the application while still trying to be
>> efficient in use of network ports/interfaces.
>> 
>> If someone feels up to the task of sending a little education my way,
>> I would be most appreciative.  There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of
>> documentation floating around about multiqueue other than a blurb of
>> text in the kernel and David's presentation of last year.
>
>Hi George
>
>Vlan is multiqueue aware, but bonding is not unfortunatly at this
>moment.
>
>We could let it being 'multiqueue' (a patch was submitted by Oleg A.
>Arkhangelsky a while ago), but bonding xmit routine needs to lock a
>central lock, shared by all queues, so it wont be very efficient...

	The lock is a read lock, so theoretically it should be possible
to enter the bonding transmit function on multiple CPUs at the same
time.  The lock may thrash around, though.

>Since this bothers me a bit, I will probably work on this in a near
>future. (adding real multiqueue capability and RCU to bonding fast
>paths)
>
>Ref: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/152987

	The question I have about it (and the above patch), is: what
does multi-queue "awareness" really mean for a bonding device?  How does
allocating a bunch of TX queues help, given that the determination of
the transmitting device hasn't necessarily been made?

	I haven't had the chance to acquire some multi-queue network
cards and check things out with bonding, so I'm not really sure how it
should work.  Should the bond look, from a multi-queue perspective, like
the largest slave, or should it look like the sum of the slaves?  Some
of this is may be mode-specific, as well.

	-J

---
	-Jay Vosburgh, IBM Linux Technology Center, fubar@...ibm.com
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