From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com (Thomas Petazzoni)
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 20:04:33 +0100
Subject: ARM network performance and dma_mask (was: [BUG,REGRESSION?]
 3.11.6+,3.12: GbE iface rate drops to few KB/s)
In-Reply-To: <20131121183834.GB18513@1wt.eu>
References: <87li0kkhzx.fsf@natisbad.org>
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 <20131119174323.GH913@1wt.eu>
 <1384885910.8604.110.camel@edumazet-glaptop2.roam.corp.google.com>
 <20131119184121.GN913@1wt.eu> <874n780wzc.fsf@natisbad.org>
 <20131120191145.GP8581@1wt.eu> <87txf692zx.fsf@natisbad.org>
 <20131120215435.GT8581@1wt.eu> <20131121004430.GX8581@1wt.eu>
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Message-ID: <20131121200433.4cb97d9e@skate>
To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
List-Id: linux-arm-kernel.lists.infradead.org

Dear Willy Tarreau,

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:38:34 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:

> While we were diagnosing a network performance regression that we finally
> found and fixed, it appeared during a test that Linus' tree shows a much
> higher performance on Armada 370 (armv7) than its predecessors. I can
> saturate the two Gig links of my Mirabox each with a single TCP flow and
> keep up to 25% of idle CPU in the optimal case. In 3.12.1 or 3.10.20, I
> can achieve around 1.3 Gbps when the two ports are used in parallel.

Interesting finding and analysis, once again!

> I'm not at ease with these things so I'd like to ask your opinion here, is
> this supposed to be an improvement or a fix ? Is this something we should
> backport into stable versions, or is there something to fix in the armada
> platform so that it works just as if the patch was applied ?

I guess the driver should have been setting its dma_mask to 0xffffffff,
since the platform is capable of doing DMA on the first 32 bits of the
physical address space, probably something like calling
pci_set_dma_mask(pdev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32)) or something like that. I know
Russell has recently added some helpers to prevent stupid people (like
me) from doing mistakes when setting the DMA masks. Certainly worth
having a look.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com