Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Simplified 16 bit Toeplitz hash algorithm

[Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>]

>> The general idea is to at least keep the traffic local to one TX/RX
>> queue pair so that if we cannot match the queue pair to the application,
>> perhaps the application can be affinitized to match up with the queue
>> pair.  Otherwise we end up with traffic getting routed to one TX queue
>> on one CPU, and the RX being routed to another queue on perhaps a
>> different CPU and it becomes quite difficult to match up the queues and
>> the applications.
>
> Right.  That certainly seems like a Good Thing, though I believe it can
> be implemented generically by recording the RX queue number on the
> socket:
>
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/158477
>
I still don't see the value in doing this RX/TX queue pairing (unless
you're considering the possibility of explicitly binding sockets to
queue pairs).  XPS should be sufficient mechanism to get affinity on
sending side.  Also, don't know how the queue paring model will be
maintained when using priority queues on transmit-- transmit is likely
to be asymmetric to receive side.  The ability to seamlessly decouple
transmit queues and receive queues seems like a nice property.

>> Since the approach is based on Toeplitz it can be applied to all
>> hardware capable of generating a Toeplitz based hash and as a result it
>> would likely also work in a much more vendor neutral kind of way than
>> Flow Director currently does.
>
The device hash should already be available in sk_rxhash, so maybe
that could be used for this purpose.  I think it is a good property to
keeping treat the device hashes as opaque values, any reasonable
32-bit 4-tuple hash should work equally well in the stack.