Re: [PATCH v9 bpf-next 02/14] xdp: introduce flags field in xdp_buff/xdp_frame

Alexander Duyck
2021-07-06T15:02:55Z

On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 4:53 AM Lorenzo Bianconi
<lorenzo.bianconi@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 8:52 AM Lorenzo Bianconi
> > <lorenzo.bianconi@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 5:43 AM Lorenzo Bianconi
> > > > <lorenzo.bianconi@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> >
> > Hi Lorenzo,
> >
> > What about doing something like breaking up the type value in
> > xdp_mem_info? The fact is having it as an enum doesn't get us much
> > since we have a 32b type field but are only storing 4 possible values
> > there currently
> >
> > The way I see it, scatter-gather is just another memory model
> > attribute rather than being something entirely new. It makes as much
> > sense to have a bit there for MEM_TYPE_PAGE_SG as it does for
> > MEM_TYPE_PAGE_SHARED. I would consider either splitting the type field
> > into two 16b fields. For example you might have one field that
> > describes the source pool which is currently either allocated page
> > (ORDER0, SHARED), page_pool (PAGE_POOL), or XSK pool (XSK_BUFF_POOL),
> > and then two flags for type with there being either shared and/or
> > scatter-gather.
>
> Hi Alex,
>
> I am fine reducing the xdp_mem_info size defining type field as u16 instead of
> u32 but I think mb is a per-xdp_buff/xdp_frame property since at runtime we can
> receive a tiny single page xdp_buff/xdp_frame and a "jumbo" xdp_buff/xdp_frame
> composed by multiple pages. According to the documentation available in
> include/net/xdp.h, xdp_rxq_info (where xdp_mem_info is contained for xdp_buff)
> is "associated with the driver level RX-ring queues and it is information that
> is specific to how the driver have configured a given RX-ring queue" so I guess
> it is a little bit counterintuitive to add this info there.

It isn't really all that counterintuitive. However it does put the
onus on the driver to be consistent about things. So even a
single-buffer xdp_buff would technically have to be a scatter-gather
buff, but it would have no fragments in it. So the requirement would
be to initialize the frags and data_len fields to 0 for all xdp_buff
structures.

> Moreover we have the "issue" for devmap in dev_map_bpf_prog_run() when we
> perform XDP_REDIRECT with the approach you proposed and last we can reuse this
> new flags filed for XDP hw-hints support.
> What about reducing xdp_mem_info and add the flags field in xdp_buff/xdp_frame
> in order to avoid increasing the xdp_buff/xdp_frame size? Am I missing
> something?

The problem is there isn't a mem_info field in the xdp_buff. It is in
the Rx queue info structure.

Thanks,

- Alex