• willy tarreau's avatar
    net: mvneta: fix Tx interrupt delay · d287a67d
    willy tarreau authored
    commit aebea2ba upstream.
    
    The mvneta driver sets the amount of Tx coalesce packets to 16 by
    default. Normally that does not cause any trouble since the driver
    uses a much larger Tx ring size (532 packets). But some sockets
    might run with very small buffers, much smaller than the equivalent
    of 16 packets. This is what ping is doing for example, by setting
    SNDBUF to 324 bytes rounded up to 2kB by the kernel.
    
    The problem is that there is no documented method to force a specific
    packet to emit an interrupt (eg: the last of the ring) nor is it
    possible to make the NIC emit an interrupt after a given delay.
    
    In this case, it causes trouble, because when ping sends packets over
    its raw socket, the few first packets leave the system, and the first
    15 packets will be emitted without an IRQ being generated, so without
    the skbs being freed. And since the socket's buffer is small, there's
    no way to reach that amount of packets, and the ping ends up with
    "send: no buffer available" after sending 6 packets. Running with 3
    instances of ping in parallel is enough to hide the problem, because
    with 6 packets per instance, that's 18 packets total, which is enough
    to grant a Tx interrupt before all are sent.
    
    The original driver in the LSP kernel worked around this design flaw
    by using a software timer to clean up the Tx descriptors. This timer
    was slow and caused terrible network performance on some Tx-bound
    workloads (such as routing) but was enough to make tools like ping
    work correctly.
    
    Instead here, we simply set the packet counts before interrupt to 1.
    This ensures that each packet sent will produce an interrupt. NAPI
    takes care of coalescing interrupts since the interrupt is disabled
    once generated.
    
    No measurable performance impact nor CPU usage were observed on small
    nor large packets, including when saturating the link on Tx, and this
    fixes tools like ping which rely on too small a send buffer. If one
    wants to increase this value for certain workloads where it is safe
    to do so, "ethtool -C $dev tx-frames" will override this default
    setting.
    
    This fix needs to be applied to stable kernels starting with 3.10.
    Tested-By: default avatarMaggie Mae Roxas <maggie.mae.roxas@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWilly Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLuis Henriques <luis.henriques@canonical.com>
    d287a67d
mvneta.c 84 KB