Re: [tbench regression fixes]: digging out smelly deadmen.

Stephen Hemminger
2008-10-31T19:57:29Z

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:45:33 +0100
Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com> wrote:

> David Miller a écrit :
> > From: "Ilpo Järvinen" <ilpo.jarvinen@helsinki.fi>
> > Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:40:16 +0200 (EET)
> >
> >> Let me remind that it is just a single process, so no ping-pong & other
> >> lock related cache effects should play any significant role here, no? (I'm
> >> no expert though :-)).
> >
> > Not locks or ping-pongs perhaps, I guess. So it just sends and
> > receives over a socket, implementing both ends of the communication
> > in the same process?
> >
> > If hash chain conflicts do happen for those 2 sockets, just traversing
> > the chain 2 entries deep could show up.
>
> tbench is very sensible to cache line ping-pongs (on SMP machines of course)
>
> Just to prove my point, I coded the following patch and tried it
> on a HP BL460c G1. This machine has 2 quad cores cpu
> (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5450 @3.00GHz)
>
> tbench 8 went from 2240 MB/s to 2310 MB/s after this patch applied
>
> [PATCH] net: Introduce netif_set_last_rx() helper
>
> On SMP machine, loopback device (and possibly others net device)
> should try to avoid dirty the memory cache line containing "last_rx"
> field. Got 3% increase on tbench on a 8 cpus machine.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
> ---
> drivers/net/loopback.c | 2 +-
> include/linux/netdevice.h | 16 ++++++++++++++++
> 2 files changed, 17 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
>

Why bother with last_rx at all on loopback. I have been thinking
we should figure out a way to get rid of last_rx all together. It only
seems to be used by bonding, and the bonding driver could do the calculation
in its receive handling.