RE: [PATCH] bnx2x: add support for receive hashing

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

Le dimanche 11 juillet 2010 à 06:16 -0700, Vladislav Zolotarov a écrit :
> Dave, it's obvious that there a demand for a new HW/FW configuration
> from our side - "rx hash enable" which is currently tightly coupled
> with the RSS capability. As long as RSS flow in our FW includes a few
> more things apart from just creating an RSS hash and as long as there
> are flows (even hypothetical) that demand the RSS hash regardless the
> RSS itself we started to work on separation of these two features from
> FW perspective. This of course will demand a new FW version but once
> we have it we'll be able to be more specific in HW configuration and
> have a cleaner code.
> 
> Technically, our FW may provide the Rx HASH always and in a current
> driver configuration this is what it does.
> I wonder if the driver always provides the HW RX HASH in the
> skb->rxhash regardless the value of NETIF_F_RXHASH bit in a
> netdev->features will it cause any harm? If not we can get rid of two
> extra conditionals in the bnx2x_rx_int().

Hi

Please dont top-post on netdev, thanks.

NETIF_RX_HASH bit is needed so that we can disable skb->rxhash from a
particular NIC if we know the hardware provided rxhash is not fulfilling
our needs (We prefer spend some cpu cycles to recompute a software
rxhash).

Software one for example deliver same rxhash values for both ways of a
TCP flow, it can help conntracking for example.

The conditional in driver rx is cheap, since the condition is the same
for all packets and CPU can predicts the branch.