• Felix Fietkau's avatar
    mac80211: minstrel_ht: improve rate probing for devices with static fallback · 48cb3952
    Felix Fietkau authored
    On some devices that only support static rate fallback tables sending rate
    control probing packets can be really expensive.
    Probing lower rates can already hurt throughput quite a bit. What hurts even
    more is the fact that on mt76x0/mt76x2, single probing packets can only be
    forced by directing packets at a different internal hardware queue, which
    causes some heavy reordering and extra latency.
    The reordering issue is mainly problematic while pushing lots of packets to
    a particular station. If there is little activity, the overhead of probing is
    neglegible.
    
    The static fallback behavior is designed to pretty much only handle rate
    control algorithms that use only a very limited set of rates on which the
    algorithm switches up/down based on packet error rate.
    
    In order to better support that kind of hardware, this patch implements a
    different approach to rate probing where it switches to a slightly higher rate,
    waits for tx status feedback, then updates the stats and switches back to
    the new max throughput rate. This only triggers above a packet rate of 100
    per stats interval (~50ms).
    For that kind of probing, the code has to reduce the set of probing rates
    a lot more compared to single packet probing, so it uses only one packet
    per MCS group which is either slightly faster, or as close as possible to
    the max throughput rate.
    This allows switching between similar rates with different numbers of
    streams. The algorithm assumes that the hardware will work its way lower
    within an MCS group in case of retransmissions, so that lower rates don't
    have to be probed by the high packets per second rate probing code.
    
    To further reduce the search space, it also does not probe rates with lower
    channel bandwidth than the max throughput rate.
    
    At the moment, these changes will only affect mt76x0/mt76x2.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarFelix Fietkau <nbd@nbd.name>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20190820095449.45255-4-nbd@nbd.nameSigned-off-by: default avatarJohannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
    48cb3952
rc80211_minstrel.h 2.96 KB