netdev - Re: stmmac ethernet in kernel 4.9-rc6: coalescing related pauses.

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <20161124212540.GA24796@amd>
Date:   Thu, 24 Nov 2016 22:25:40 +0100
From:   Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>
To:     David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Cc:     peppe.cavallaro@...com, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: stmmac ethernet in kernel 4.9-rc6: coalescing related pauses.

Hi!

> >> I'm debugging strange delays during transmit in stmmac driver. They
> >> seem to be present in 4.4 kernel (and older kernels, too). Workload is
> >> burst of udp packets being sent, pause, burst of udp packets, ...
...
> > 4.9-rc6 still has the delays. With the
> > 
> > #define STMMAC_COAL_TX_TIMER 1000
> > #define STMMAC_TX_MAX_FRAMES 2
> > 
> > settings, delays go away, and driver still works. (It fails fairly
> > fast in 4.4). Good news. But the question still is: what is going on
> > there?
> 
> 256 packets looks way too large for being a trigger for aborting the
> TX coalescing timer.
> 
> Looking more deeply into this, the driver is using non-highres timers
> to implement the TX coalescing.  This simply cannot work.
> 
> 1 HZ, which is the lowest granularity of non-highres timers in the
> kernel, is variable as well as already too large of a delay for
> effective TX coalescing.
> 
> I seriously think that the TX coalescing support should be ripped out
> or disabled entirely until it is implemented properly in this
> driver.

Ok, I'd disable coalescing, but could not figure it out till. What is
generic way to do that?

It seems only thing stmmac_tx_timer() does is calling
stmmac_tx_clean(), which reclaims tx_skbuff[] entries. It should be
possible to do that explicitely, without delay, but it stops working
completely if I attempt to do that.

On a side note, stmmac_poll() does stmmac_enable_dma_irq() while
stmmac_dma_interrupt() disables interrupts. But I don't see any
protection between the two, so IMO it could race and we'd end up
without polling or interrupts...

Thanks and best regards,
									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Download attachment "signature.asc" of type "application/pgp-signature" (182 bytes)