From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Nivedita Singhvi Subject: Re: design for TSO performance fix Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:44:43 -0800 Message-ID: <41F9DF5B.6050305@us.ibm.com> References: <20050127163146.33b01e95.davem@davemloft.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "David S. Miller" , netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: Andi Kleen In-Reply-To: Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Andi Kleen wrote: > I looked at this some time ago to pass lists of packets > to qdisc and hard_queue_xmit, because that would allow less locking > overhead and allow some drivers to send stuff more efficiently > to the hardware registers > (It was one of the items in my "how to speed up the stack" list ;-) > > I never ended up implementing it because TSO gave most of the advantages > anyways. I admit that it's been several months since I last looked at this - and was just handwaving, had no code. But I had thought the converse then - that it might be better to abandon TSO and just have the stack pass down the list of skbs in one pass. Had been mentioned by Andi as well as Anton. We'd get much of the gain, avoid a lot of the complexity, and the code would be simpler. And I'm not positive about this but it seemed it would handle memory fragmentation better, too. Bogus? thanks, Nivedita