[PATCH 6.6 195/283] svcrdma: Increase the per-transport rw_ctx count

Sasha Levin
2026-02-28T18:09:52Z

From: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>

[ Upstream commit 2da0f610e733606e06284ac3c1f188b9dec75d68 ]

rdma_rw_mr_factor() returns the smallest number of MRs needed to
move a particular number of pages. svcrdma currently asks for the
number of MRs needed to move RPCSVC_MAXPAGES (a little over one
megabyte), as that is the number of pages in the largest r/wsize
the server supports.

This call assumes that the client's NIC can bundle a full one
megabyte payload in a single rdma_segment. In fact, most NICs cannot
handle a full megabyte with a single rkey / rdma_segment. Clients
will typically split even a single Read chunk into many segments.

The server needs one MR to read each rdma_segment in a Read chunk,
and thus each one needs an rw_ctx.

svcrdma has been vastly underestimating the number of rw_ctxs needed
to handle 64 RPC requests with large Read chunks using small
rdma_segments.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good way to estimate this
number without knowing the client NIC's capabilities. Even then,
the client RPC/RDMA implementation is still free to split a chunk
into smaller segments (for example, it might be using physical
registration, which needs an rdma_segment per page).

The best we can do for now is choose a number that will guarantee
forward progress in the worst case (one page per segment).

At some later point, we could add some mechanisms to make this
much less of a problem:
- Add a core API to add more rw_ctxs to an already-established QP
- svcrdma could treat rw_ctx exhaustion as a temporary error and
try again
- Limit the number of Reads in flight

Signed-off-by: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Stable-dep-of: afcae7d7b8a2 ("RDMA/core: add rdma_rw_max_sge() helper for SQ sizing")
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
---
net/sunrpc/xprtrdma/svc_rdma_transport.c | 9 +++++++--
1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/net/sunrpc/xprtrdma/svc_rdma_transport.c b/net/sunrpc/xprtrdma/svc_rdma_transport.c
index e26d1a7035e55..41db2b1ee0d13 100644
--- a/net/sunrpc/xprtrdma/svc_rdma_transport.c
+++ b/net/sunrpc/xprtrdma/svc_rdma_transport.c
@@ -415,8 +415,13 @@ static struct svc_xprt *svc_rdma_accept(struct svc_xprt *xprt)
newxprt->sc_max_requests = rq_depth - 2;
newxprt->sc_max_bc_requests = 2;
}
- ctxts = rdma_rw_mr_factor(dev, newxprt->sc_port_num, RPCSVC_MAXPAGES);
- ctxts *= newxprt->sc_max_requests;
+
+ /* Arbitrarily estimate the number of rw_ctxs needed for
+ * this transport. This is enough rw_ctxs to make forward
+ * progress even if the client is using one rkey per page
+ * in each Read chunk.
+ */
+ ctxts = 3 * RPCSVC_MAXPAGES;
newxprt->sc_sq_depth = rq_depth + ctxts;
if (newxprt->sc_sq_depth > dev->attrs.max_qp_wr)
newxprt->sc_sq_depth = dev->attrs.max_qp_wr;
--
2.51.0