Re: [PATCH intel-net 1/2] ice: xsk: change batched Tx descriptor cleaning

Maciej Fijalkowski
2022-08-30T12:44:04Z

On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 02:38:02PM +0200, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:
> AF_XDP Tx descriptor cleaning in ice driver currently works in a "lazy"
> way - descriptors are not cleaned immediately after send. We rather hold
> on with cleaning until we see that free space in ring drops below
> particular threshold. This was supposed to reduce the amount of
> unnecessary work related to cleaning and instead of keeping the ring
> empty, ring was rather saturated.
>
> In AF_XDP realm cleaning Tx descriptors implies producing them to CQ.
> This is a way of letting know user space that particular descriptor has
> been sent, as John points out in [0].
>
> We tried to implement serial descriptor cleaning which would be used in
> conjunction with batched cleaning but it made code base more convoluted
> and probably harder to maintain in future. Therefore we step away from
> batched cleaning in a current form in favor of an approach where we set
> RS bit on every last descriptor from a batch and clean always at the
> beginning of ice_xmit_zc().
>
> This means that we give up a bit of Tx performance, but this doesn't
> hurt l2fwd scenario due to the fact that Tx side is much faster than Rx
> and Rx is the one that has to catch Tx up. txonly can be treaten as
> AF_XDP based packet generator.
>
> FWIW Tx descriptors are still produced in a batched way.
>
> Fixes: 126cdfe1007a ("ice: xsk: Improve AF_XDP ZC Tx and use batching API")
> [0]: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/62b0a20232920_3573208ab@john.notmuch/
>
> Fixes: 126cdfe1007a ("ice: xsk: Improve AF_XDP ZC Tx and use batching API")

Ugh too much of a fixes tag. I'll send a v2.

> Signed-off-by: Maciej Fijalkowski <maciej.fijalkowski@intel.com>
> ---
> drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ice/ice_txrx.c | 2 +-
> drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ice/ice_xsk.c | 143 +++++++++-------------
> drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ice/ice_xsk.h | 7 +-
> 3 files changed, 64 insertions(+), 88 deletions(-)
>