Re: igb driver can cause cache invalidation of non-owned memory?

[Nikita Yushchenko <nikita.yoush@cogentembedded.com>]

Hi Alexander

Thanks for your explanation.

> The main reason why this isn't a concern for the igb driver is because
> we currently pass the page up as read-only.  We don't allow the stack
> to write into the page by keeping the page count greater than 1 which
> means that the page is shared.  It isn't until we unmap the page that
> the page count is allowed to drop to 1 indicating that it is writable.

Doesn't that mean that sync_to_device() in igb_reuse_rx_page() can be
avoided? If page is read only for entire world, then it can't be dirty
in cache and thus device can safely write to it without preparation step.

Nikita


P.S.

We are observing strange performance anomaly with igb on imx6q board.

Test is - simple iperf UDP receive. Other host runs
  iperf -c X.X.X.X -u -b xxxM -t 300 -i 3

Imx6q board can run iperf -s -u, or it can run nothing - result is the same.

While generated traffic (controlled via xxx) is slow, softirq thread on
imx6 board takes near-zero cpu time.  With increasing xxx, it still is
near zero - up to some moment about 700 Mbps. At this moment softirqd
cpu usage suddenly jumps to almost 100%.  Without anything in between:
it is near-zero with slightly smaller traffic, and it is immediately
>99% with slightly larger traffic.

Profiling this situation (>99% in softirqd) with perf gives up to 50%
hits inside cache invalidation loops. That's why originally we thought
cache invalidation is slow. But having the above dependency between
traffic and softirq cpu usage (where napi code runs) can't be explained
with slow cache invalidation.

Also there are additional factors:
- if UDP traffic is dropped - via iptables, or via forcing error paths
at different points of network stack - softirqd cpu usage drops back to
near-zero - although it still does all the same cache invalidations,
- I tried to modify igb driver to disallow page reuse (made
igb_add_rx_frag() always returning false). Result was - "border traffic"
where softirq cpu usage goes from zero to 100% changed from ~700 Mbps to
~400 Mbps.

Any ideas what can happen there, and how to debug it?

TIA