Date:   Mon, 15 Jul 2019 11:48:41 +0200
From:   Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
To:     Benjamin Poirier <bpoirier@...e.com>
Cc:     David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Manish Chopra <manishc@...vell.com>,
        GR-Linux-NIC-Dev@...vell.com, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 01/16] qlge: Remove irq_cnt

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 10:40:16AM +0900, Benjamin Poirier wrote:
> On 2019/06/17 16:48, Benjamin Poirier wrote:
> > qlge uses an irq enable/disable refcounting scheme that is:
> > * poorly implemented
> > 	Uses a spin_lock to protect accesses to the irq_cnt atomic variable
> > * buggy
> > 	Breaks when there is not a 1:1 sequence of irq - napi_poll, such as
> > 	when using SO_BUSY_POLL.
> > * unnecessary
> > 	The purpose or irq_cnt is to reduce irq control writes when
> > 	multiple work items result from one irq: the irq is re-enabled
> > 	after all work is done.
> > 	Analysis of the irq handler shows that there is only one case where
> > 	there might be two workers scheduled at once, and those have
> > 	separate irq masking bits.
> > 
> > Therefore, remove irq_cnt.
> > 
> > Additionally, we get a performance improvement:
> > perf stat -e cycles -a -r5 super_netperf 100 -H 192.168.33.1 -t TCP_RR
> > 
> > Before:
> > 628560
> > 628056
> > 622103
> > 622744
> > 627202
> > [...]
> >    268,803,947,669      cycles                 ( +-  0.09% )
> > 
> > After:
> > 636300
> > 634106
> > 634984
> > 638555
> > 634188
> > [...]
> >    259,237,291,449      cycles                 ( +-  0.19% )
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Poirier <bpoirier@...e.com>
> 
> David, Greg,
> 
> Before I send v2 of this patchset, how about moving this driver out to
> staging? The hardware has been declared EOL by the vendor but what's
> more relevant to the Linux kernel is that the quality of this driver is
> not on par with many other mainline drivers, IMO. Over in staging, the
> code might benefit from the attention of interested parties (drive-by
> fixers) or fade away into obscurity.
> 
> Now that I check, the code has >500 basic checkpatch issues. While
> working on the rx processing code for the current patchset, I noticed
> the following more structural issues:
> * commit 7c734359d350 ("qlge: Size RX buffers based on MTU.",
>   v2.6.33-rc1) introduced dead code in the receive routines, which
>   should be rewritten anyways by the admission of the author himself
>   (see the comment above ql_build_rx_skb())
> * truesize accounting is incorrect (ex: a 9000B frame has truesize 10280
>   while containing two frags of order-1 allocations, ie. >16K)
> * in some cases the driver allocates skbs with head room but only puts
>   data in the frags
> * there is an inordinate amount of disparate debugging code, most of
>   which is of questionable value. In particular, qlge_dbg.c has hundreds
>   of lines of code bitrotting away in ifdef land (doesn't compile since
>   commit 18c49b91777c ("qlge: do vlan cleanup", v3.1-rc1), 8 years ago).
> * triggering an ethtool regdump will instead hexdump a 176k struct to
>   dmesg depending on some module parameters
> * many structures are defined full of holes, as we found in this
>   thread already; are used inefficiently (struct rx_ring is used for rx
>   and tx completions, with some members relevant to one case only); are
>   initialized redundantly (ex. memset 0 after alloc_etherdev). The
>   driver also has a habit of using runtime checks where compile time
>   checks are possible.
> * in terms of namespace, the driver uses either qlge_, ql_ (used by
>   other qlogic drivers, with clashes, ex: ql_sem_spinlock) or nothing (with
>   clashes, ex: struct ob_mac_iocb_req)
> 
> I'm guessing other parts of the driver have more issues of the same
> nature. The driver also has many smaller issues like deprecated apis,
> duplicate or useless comments, weird code structure (some "while" loops
> that could be rewritten with simple "for", ex. ql_wait_reg_rdy()) and
> weird line wrapping (all over, ex. the ql_set_routing_reg() calls in
> qlge_set_multicast_list()).
> 
> I'm aware of some precedents for code moving from mainline to staging:
> 1bb8155080c6 ncpfs: move net/ncpfs to drivers/staging/ncpfs (v4.16-rc1)
> 6c391ff758eb irda: move drivers/net/irda to drivers/staging/irda/drivers
> (v4.14-rc1)
> 
> What do you think is the best course of action in this case?

Feel free to move it to staging if you want it removed from the tree in
a few releases if no one is willing to do the work to keep it alive.  If
someone comes along later, it's a trivial revert to add it back.

So send a patch moving it, with all of the information you listed above
in a TODO file for the directory, and I'll be glad to take it.

thanks,

greg k-h

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