Re: [PATCH 3/6] mac80211: Add airtime accounting and scheduling to TXQs

[Rajkumar Manoharan <rmanohar@codeaurora.org>]

On 2018-11-07 06:53, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
> Rajkumar Manoharan <rmanohar@codeaurora.org> writes:
> 
>> Meanwhile we did some more experiments with both modes. The experiment
>> was done in open environment and fixed rate and UDP traffic ran for 60
>> seconds.
>> 
>> Seems like push mode not honoring the configured weight. Always the
>> airtime was almost same whereas in pull-mode airtime is changing based
>> on configured weight. Hence I would like to know your results.
> 
> Right, so I verified that the current version of the patch set still
> works with ath9k. However, the ath10k card I have doesn't seem to
> support peer stats, so I can't test ath10k.
> 
> $ lspci | grep Qualcomm
> 03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA986x/988x 802.11ac
> Wireless Network Adapter
> 
> $ cat /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy1/ath10k/chip_id
> 0x043202ff
> 
> $ cat /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy1/ath10k/wmi_services  | grep PEER
> WMI_SERVICE_PEER_CACHING                 -
> WMI_SERVICE_PEER_STATS                   -
> 

Oops... Yeah 988x firmware (10.2.4) does not have peer stats support.

> 
> Is there a way to force-enable airtime support, is this a hardware 
> issue?
> 
Unfortunately not. There is one more pending change that handles airtime 
report
from HTT tx-compl. Again it depends firmware support. These experiments 
are
taken with this f/w interface. Will post the change.

>> 		sta1		sta2		sta3		sta4
>> pull-mode	8s(205us)	18s(3.2ms)	8s(205us)	14s(410us)
>> 		12s(256us)	12s(256us)	13s(256us)	12s(256us)
>> 		14s(4ms)	13s(4ms)	14s(4ms)	13s(4ms)
>> 
>> push-mode	15s(205us)	12s(3.2ms)	16s(205us)	12s(410us)
>> 		15s(256us)	12s(256us)	16s(256us)	12s(256us)
>> 		14s(4ms)	13s(4ms)	16s(4ms)	12s(4ms)
> 
> Right, so the pull-mode results are encouraging! *Something* is
> happening, at least, even though the aggregate airtime doesn't quite
> match the ratios of the configured weights.
> 
> Are you running the UDP generator on the AP itself, or on a separate
> device, BTW? If it's on the AP, the userspace socket can get throttled,
> which will interfere with results, so it's better to have it on a
> separate device (connected via ethernet).
> 
Traffic b/w wired client (via ethernet) and wireless clients.

> As for push-mode, could this be because of bad buffer management? I.e.,
> because there's a lag between the time airtime is registered, and the
> time that airtime usage is reported, the driver just pushes a whole
> bunch of packets to the firmware when it gets the chance, which 
> prevents
> the scheduler from throttling properly. This could also explain the
> better, but not quite perfect, results in pull mode, assuming that pull
> mode results in better firmware buffer management which reduces, but
> doesn't quite remove, the lag.
> 
Hmm... I agree that lag in reporting airtime may cause more data push to 
hw.
Right now both tx and tx-compl are serialized by active_txq_lock. So 
once
lock acquired by tx path, it will download all frames. i.e it is even 
true for
ath9k driver. Hence I am wondering how it is working only with ath9k.

In ath10k, The airtime always be reported in tx-completion. I dont see 
much lag
from my experiments.

> If this is indeed the reason, the queue limit patches should hopefully
> be a solution. So guess we need to get those working as well :)
> 
I would prefer to baseline the basic infra into upstream first and do 
enhancement
on top of that. I request you to revisit maintaining per driver default. 
Otherwise
there would be performance impact with 256us. :(

-Rajkumar

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