From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on aws-us-west-2-korg-lkml-1.web.codeaurora.org Received: from vger.kernel.org (vger.kernel.org [23.128.96.18]) by smtp.lore.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9B5E8C6FD1C for ; Fri, 24 Mar 2023 17:35:12 +0000 (UTC) Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S231848AbjCXRfL (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:35:11 -0400 Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net ([23.128.96.19]:57910 "EHLO lindbergh.monkeyblade.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S229649AbjCXRfJ (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:35:09 -0400 Received: from nbd.name (nbd.name [46.4.11.11]) by lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id BD83DC64C; Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:35:08 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; q=dns/txt; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=nbd.name; s=20160729; h=Content-Transfer-Encoding:Content-Type:In-Reply-To:Subject:From :References:Cc:To:MIME-Version:Date:Message-ID:Sender:Reply-To:Content-ID: Content-Description:Resent-Date:Resent-From:Resent-Sender:Resent-To:Resent-Cc :Resent-Message-ID:List-Id:List-Help:List-Unsubscribe:List-Subscribe: List-Post:List-Owner:List-Archive; bh=miGmwI1bTGkIjWnSC43LX/N+9isfAegXHNpz6mp4Veg=; b=myXgInc3xx8PMiPFGMZq3OGoHm ZLnQv4NmgXzemL98aFuh6/2u4qpW7QGvhTTTAxoi+QH4U2t3U6biOks9dNPgc0koyO3B1cta6kLct TPulu/bIE//tDM3Lw+Vr+4AiLUeKVslDfbkfB2qtTy1lwSfdOb+llXeHtEIr7IsMWZ1I=; Received: from p200300daa7147b00f53b1e71cf2162bd.dip0.t-ipconnect.de ([2003:da:a714:7b00:f53b:1e71:cf21:62bd] helo=nf.local) by ds12 with esmtpsa (TLS1.3) tls TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (Exim 4.94.2) (envelope-from ) id 1pflJc-006Rgm-PY; Fri, 24 Mar 2023 18:35:00 +0100 Message-ID: <2d251879-1cf4-237d-8e62-c42bb4feb047@nbd.name> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2023 18:35:00 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.9.0 Content-Language: en-US To: Jakub Kicinski Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org, Jonathan Corbet , "David S. Miller" , Eric Dumazet , Paolo Abeni , linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20230324171314.73537-1-nbd@nbd.name> <20230324102038.7d91355c@kernel.org> From: Felix Fietkau Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] net/core: add optional threading for backlog processing In-Reply-To: <20230324102038.7d91355c@kernel.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: netdev@vger.kernel.org On 24.03.23 18:20, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 18:13:14 +0100 Felix Fietkau wrote: >> When dealing with few flows or an imbalance on CPU utilization, static RPS >> CPU assignment can be too inflexible. Add support for enabling threaded NAPI >> for backlog processing in order to allow the scheduler to better balance >> processing. This helps better spread the load across idle CPUs. > > Can you explain the use case a little bit more? I'm primarily testing this on routers with 2 or 4 CPUs and limited processing power, handling routing/NAT. RPS is typically needed to properly distribute the load across all available CPUs. When there is only a small number of flows that are pushing a lot of traffic, a static RPS assignment often leaves some CPUs idle, whereas others become a bottleneck by being fully loaded. Threaded NAPI reduces this a bit, but CPUs can become bottlenecked and fully loaded by a NAPI thread alone. Making backlog processing threaded helps split up the processing work even more and distribute it onto remaining idle CPUs. It can basically be used to make RPS a bit more dynamic and configurable, because you can assign multiple backlog threads to a set of CPUs and selectively steer packets from specific devices / rx queues to them and allow the scheduler to take care of the rest. - Felix