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Message-ID: <adazm347sdw.fsf@cisco.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:52:11 -0700
From: Roland Dreier <rdreier@...co.com>
To: Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>
Cc: David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, greearb@...delatech.com,
netdev@...r.kernel.org, kaber@...sh.net, hadi@...erus.ca,
peter.p.waskiewicz.jr@...el.com, auke-jan.h.kok@...el.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] NET: Multiqueue network device support.
> > The MAC is still very much centralized in most designs.
> > So one way they'll do it is to support assigning N MAC addresses,
> > and you configure the input filters of the chip to push packets
> > for each MAC to the proper receive queue.
> > So the MAC will accept any of those in the N MAC addresses as
> > it's own, then you use the filtering facilities to steer
> > frames to the correct RX queue.
>
> Not quite... You'll have to deal with multiple Rx filters, not just
> the current one-filter-for-all model present in today's NICs. Pools
> of queues will have separate configured characteristics. The "steer"
> portion you mention is a bottleneck that wants to be eliminated.
I think you're misunderstanding. These NICs still have only one
physical port, so sending or receiving real packets onto a physical
wire is fundamentally serialized. The steering of packets to receive
queues is done right after the packets are received from the wire --
in fact it can be done as soon as the NIC has parsed enough of the
headers to make a decision, which might be before the full packet has
even been received. The steering is no more of a bottleneck than the
physical link is.
- R.
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