netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next 2/2] page_pool: support non-frag page for page_pool_alloc

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Date: Fri, 26 May 2023 08:16:47 -0700
From: Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>
To: Yunsheng Lin <linyunsheng@...wei.com>
Cc: davem@...emloft.net, kuba@...nel.org, pabeni@...hat.com, 
	netdev@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, 
	Lorenzo Bianconi <lorenzo@...nel.org>, Jesper Dangaard Brouer <hawk@...nel.org>, 
	Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@...aro.org>, Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 2/2] page_pool: support non-frag page for page_pool_alloc_frag()

On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 2:28 AM Yunsheng Lin <linyunsheng@...wei.com> wrote:
>
> There is performance penalty with using page frag support when
> user requests a larger frag size and a page only supports one
> frag user, see [1].
>
> It seems like user may request different frag size depending
> on the mtu and packet size, provide an option to allocate
> non-frag page when a whole page is not able to hold two frags,
> so that user has a unified interface for the memory allocation
> with least memory utilization and performance penalty.
>
> 1. https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/ZEU+vospFdm08IeE@localhost.localdomain/
>
> Signed-off-by: Yunsheng Lin <linyunsheng@...wei.com>
> CC: Lorenzo Bianconi <lorenzo@...nel.org>
> CC: Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>

The way I see it there are several problems with this approach.

First, why not just increase the page order rather than trying to
essentially make page_pool_alloc_frag into an analog for
page_pool_alloc_pages? I know for the skb allocator we are working
with an order 3 page. You could likely do something similar here to
achieve the better performance you are looking for.

Second, I am not a fan of these changes as they seem to be wasteful
for drivers that might make use of a mix of large and small
allocations. If we aren't going to use fragments then we should
probably just wrap the call to this function in an inline wrapper that
checks the size and just automatically pulls the larger sizes off into
the non-frag allocation path. Look at something such as
__netdev_alloc_skb as an example.