netdev - Re: Network card IRQ balancing with Intel 5000 series chipsets

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Date:	Mon, 25 Dec 2006 12:34:59 +0100
From:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
To:	Robert Iakobashvili <coroberti@...il.com>
Cc:	netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Network card IRQ balancing with Intel 5000 series chipsets

On Mon, 2006-12-25 at 13:26 +0200, Robert Iakobashvili wrote:
> 
> > Am I understanding you correctly that you want to spread the load of the
> > networking IRQ roughly equally over 2 cpus (or cores or ..)?
> 
> Yes, 4 cores.
> 
> > If so, that is very very suboptimal, especially for networking (since
> > suddenly a lot of packet processing gets to deal with out of order
> > receives and cross-cpu reassembly).
> 
> Agree. Unfortunately, we have a flow of small RTP packets with heavy
> processing and both Rx and Tx component on a single network card.
> The application is not too much sensitive to the out of order, etc.
> Thus, there 3 cores are actually doing nothing, whereas the CPU0
> is overloaded, preventing system CPU scaling.

in principle the actual work should still be spread over the cores;
unless you do everything in kernel space that is..

> Agree, that providing CPU affinity for a network interrupt is a rather
> reasonable default.
> However, should a chipset manufacture take from us the very freedom of
> tuning, freedom of choice?

it can still be done using the TPR (Thread Priority Register) of the
APIC. It's just... not there in Linux (other OSes do use this).

-- 
if you want to mail me at work (you don't), use arjan (at) linux.intel.com
Test the interaction between Linux and your BIOS via http://www.linuxfirmwarekit.org

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