netdev - Re: Question on Lockless TX

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Date:	Fri, 18 Apr 2014 14:32:53 -0600
From:	Sharat Masetty <sharat04@...il.com>
To:	Tom Herbert <therbert@...gle.com>
Cc:	Linux Netdev List <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Question on Lockless TX

I think this flag will work for our case, but in the documentation
section it says
"Note that the use of NETIF_F_LLTX is deprecated.  Don't use it for
new drivers." Trying to dig into this a little more but not sure why
this deprecated and should not be used.. can you shed some light here?
Are there any known issues with this flag?

I did see this thread from a while back:
https://lwn.net/Articles/121566/ but issue seems to be fairly
contained..

Regards,
Sharat


On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Tom Herbert <therbert@...gle.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Sharat Masetty <sharat04@...il.com> wrote:
>> Can someone explain to me, why would a driver choose to implement
>> Lockless TX? What are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing to do
>> so?Any performance benefits? A reference to a sample driver
>> implementation would be helpful to understand.
>>
> Locks in the TX path are needed provide mutual exclusion to the
> underlying HW queue and other structures. Some drivers either don't
> need any form of locking because their is no queue to protect (often
> the case with virtual drivers like loopback and bonding), others might
> provide their own locking at higher granularity or for other purposes.
> Generally, taking fewer locks can reduce lock contention, atomic
> operations, and cache line misses. If you grep for NETIF_F_LLTX under
> drivers/net you can find examples of drivers that support this. Also,
> please look at Documentation/networking/netdevices.txt.
>
> Tom
>
>> Thanks
>> Sharat
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