Re: [RFC] net: add support for threaded NAPI polling

[Eric Dumazet <erdnetdev@gmail.com>]

On 7/26/20 10:19 AM, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> On 2020-07-26 18:49, Eric Dumazet wrote:
>> On 7/26/20 9:31 AM, Felix Fietkau wrote:
>>> For some drivers (especially 802.11 drivers), doing a lot of work in the NAPI
>>> poll function does not perform well. Since NAPI poll is bound to the CPU it
>>> was scheduled from, we can easily end up with a few very busy CPUs spending
>>> most of their time in softirq/ksoftirqd and some idle ones.
>>>
>>> Introduce threaded NAPI for such drivers based on a workqueue. The API is the
>>> same except for using netif_threaded_napi_add instead of netif_napi_add.
>>>
>>> In my tests with mt76 on MT7621 using threaded NAPI + a thread for tx scheduling
>>> improves LAN->WLAN bridging throughput by 10-50%. Throughput without threaded
>>> NAPI is wildly inconsistent, depending on the CPU that runs the tx scheduling
>>> thread.
>>>
>>> With threaded NAPI, throughput seems stable and consistent (and higher than
>>> the best results I got without it).
>>
>> Note that even with a threaded NAPI, you will not be able to use more than one cpu
>> to process the traffic.
> For a single threaded NAPI user that's correct. The main difference here
> is that the CPU running the poll function does not have to be the same
> as the CPU that scheduled it, and it can change based on the load.
> That makes a huge difference in my tests.

This really looks like there is a problem in the driver itself.

Have you first checked that this patch was not hurting your use case ?

commit 4cd13c21b207e80ddb1144c576500098f2d5f882    softirq: Let ksoftirqd do its job

If yes, your proposal would again possibly hurt user space threads competing
with a high priority workqueue, and packets would not be consumed by user applications.
Having cpus burning 100% of cycles in kernel space is useless.


It seems you need two cpus per queue, I guess this might be because
you use a single NAPI for both tx and rx ?

Have you simply tried to use two NAPI, as some Ethernet drivers do ?

Do not get me wrong, but scheduling a thread only to process one packet at a time
will hurt common cases.

Really I do not mind if you add a threaded NAPI, but it seems you missed
a lot of NAPI requirements in the proposed patch.

For instance, many ->poll() handlers assume BH are disabled.

Also part of RPS logic depends on net_rx_action() calling net_rps_action_and_irq_enable()