Re: [PATCH v9 net-next 5/7] net: simple poll/select low latency socket poll

[Eliezer Tamir <eliezer.tamir@linux.intel.com>]

On 05/06/2013 16:30, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-06-05 at 13:34 +0300, Eliezer Tamir wrote:
>> A very naive select/poll busy-poll support.
>> Add busy-polling to sock_poll().
>> When poll/select have nothing to report, call the low-level
>> sock_poll() again until we are out of time or we find something.
>> Right now we poll every socket once, this is suboptimal
>> but improves latency when the number of sockets polled is not large.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@intel.com>
>> Signed-off-by: Jesse Brandeburg <jesse.brandeburg@intel.com>
>> Tested-by: Willem de Bruijn <willemb@google.com>
>> Signed-off-by: Eliezer Tamir <eliezer.tamir@linux.intel.com>
>> ---
>
> I am a bit uneasy with this one, because an applicatio polling() on one
> thousand file descriptors using select()/poll(), will call sk_poll_ll()
> one thousand times.

But we call sk_poll_ll() with nonblock set, so it will only test once
for each socket and not loop.

I think this is not as bad as it sounds.
We still honor the time limit on how long to poll.

When we busy-wait on a single socket we call sk_poll_ll() repeatedly
until we timeout or we have something to report.

Here on the other hand, we sk_poll_ll() once for each file, so we loop 
on the files. We moved the loop from inside sk_poll_ll to select/poll.

I also plan on improving this this in the next stage.

The plan is to give control on whether sk_poll_ll is called to
select/poll/epoll, so the caller has even more control.

-Eliezer