Re: [net-next 0/6] tcp: remove prequeue and header prediction

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2017 03:57:17 +0200

> During a hallway discussion with Eric Dumazet at Netdev 1.2 in
> Tokyo some maybe-not-so-useful-anymore TCP stack features came up,
> among these header prediction and prequeueing.
> 
> In brief, TCP prequeue assumes a single-process-blocking-read design,
> which is not that common anymore. The most frequently used high-performance
> networking program that is an excellent fit for these features is netperf.
> 
> The idea behind prequeueing is to move part of tcp processing, including
> retransmit queue cleaning, to process context.
> 
> With (e)poll designs, prequeue is always skipped, so for such programs
> this is dead-code removal.
> 
> Header prediction is also less useful nowadays.
> For packet trains, GRO will do packet aggregation so we do not get the
> per-packet benefit that this had before GRO anymore.
> 
> Because of SACK, header prediction also will be ineffective once
> a connection suffers even light packet losses.
> 
> code removal aside, after this change processing always occurs in BH
> context, this allows to experiment e.g. with doing bulk freeing of
> skb heads when incoming ACKs clean packets from the retransmit queue.
> 
> There are no changes since the RFC, except in last patch (i missed
> another no-longer-used mib counter). I also edited a few commit messages.

Series applied, thanks a lot for doing this.