• Johannes Berg's avatar
    mac80211: defer tailroom counter manipulation when roaming · 8d1f7ecd
    Johannes Berg authored
    During roaming, the crypto_tx_tailroom_needed_cnt counter
    will often take values 2,1,0,1,2 because first keys are
    removed and then new keys are added. This is inefficient
    because during the 0->1 transition, synchronize_net must
    be called to avoid packet races, although typically no
    packets would be flowing during that time.
    
    To avoid that, defer the decrement (2->1, 1->0) when keys
    are removed (by half a second). This means the counter
    will really have the values 2,2,2,3,4 ... 2, thus never
    reaching 0 and having to do the 0->1 transition.
    
    Note that this patch entirely disregards the drivers for
    which this optimisation was done to start with, for them
    the key removal itself will be expensive because it has
    to synchronize_net() after the counter is incremented to
    remove the key from HW crypto. For them the sequence will
    look like this: 0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0 (*) which is clearly a
    lot more inefficient. This could be addressed separately,
    during key removal the 0->1->0 sequence isn't necessary.
    
    (*) it starts at 0 because HW crypto is on, then goes to
        1 when HW crypto is disabled for a key, then back to
        0 because the key is deleted; this happens for both
        keys in the example. When new keys are added, it goes
        to 1 first because they're added in software; when a
        key is moved to hardware it goes back to 0
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
    8d1f7ecd
ieee80211_i.h 49.6 KB