Re: [ofa-general] Re: [PATCH 2/3][NET_BATCH] net core use batching

[Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 05:04:35PM -0700, David Miller wrote:
> We have to keep in mind, however, that the sw queue right now is 1000
> packets.  I heavily discourage any driver author to try and use any
> single TX queue of that size.  

Why would you discourage them? 

If 1000 is ok for a software queue why would it not be ok
for a hardware queue?

> Which means that just dropping on back
> pressure might not work so well.
> 
> Or it might be perfect and signal TCP to backoff, who knows! :-)

1000 packets is a lot. I don't have hard data, but gut feeling 
is less would also do.

And if the hw queues are not enough a better scheme might be to
just manage this in the sockets in sendmsg. e.g. provide a wait queue that
drivers can wake up and let them block on more queue.

> The idea is that the network stack, as in the pure hw queue scheme,
> unconditionally always submits new packets to the driver.  Therefore
> even if the hw TX queue is full, the driver can still queue to an
> internal sw queue with some limit (say 1000 for ethernet, as is used
> now).
>
> 
> When the hw TX queue gains space, the driver self-batches packets
> from the sw queue to the hw queue.

I don't really see the advantage over the qdisc in that scheme.
It's certainly not simpler and probably more code and would likely
also not require less locks (e.g. a currently lockless driver
would need a new lock for its sw queue). Also it is unclear to me
it would be really any faster.

-Andi