From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Zoltan Kiss Subject: netfront: Compound pages problem Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2014 23:03:17 +0100 Message-ID: <538E4625.3080804@citrix.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Ian Campbell , Wei Liu , "netdev@vger.kernel.org" , David Vrabel , Malcolm Crossley , David Miller To: "xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org" , Paul Durrant Return-path: Received: from smtp02.citrix.com ([66.165.176.63]:35305 "EHLO SMTP02.CITRIX.COM" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751032AbaFCWDV (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Jun 2014 18:03:21 -0400 Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi, There were already discussions on this list and at Xen Hackathon about a netback/netfront issue: http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2014-06/msg00300.html In a nutshell: due to compound pages an skb can consume more slots than we can transfer for a single packet. Lots of ideas came up about how to solve this problem, the preferred short term one is to poke the buffer layout of the affected skbs so they will finally fit onto the ring. That might sound simple, but after 2 days of implementing an algorithm, which is: - handle all the possible weird scenarios - try to do as few memcpy's as possible I can tell that it's not :). Now I'm at 110 lines without comments, and it's not ready yet. Paul came up with an idea today: we can call dev_gso_segment() which will slice up the problematic skb into MTU size chunks. Then we can add this list of skbs to our queues and transmit them separately. Pros: - it already exists and works - doesn't copy the payload apart from the headers Cons: - it is also very complicated, but at least a well tested code - it creates new skbs and copies the header there, worst case max_gso_size / MTU times I tend to say this could be a good solution for us, but I want to hear other opinions as well. Regards, Zoli