[Cbe-oss-dev] [PATCH] spidernet: don't use debug flag

[Ishizaki Kou]

Linas-san,

> > GDTDCEIDIS flag is defined that it is for debug and should not be
used.
> 
> !? Certainly, my spec doesn't say anything like this;

First, I'm sorry to say that GDTDCEDIS is for debug. It's my
misunderstanding.

My HW manual of SCC simply said that GDTDCEDIS must not be set(Is 
it same for you?).  But I don't know concretely what will go wrong 
by setting this bit.

> I don't know of any other way of turning off the descriptor 
> chain end interrupt; leaving it on hurts performance in a big way.
> 
> I get the following TX performance numbers:
> 
> pkt sz       rate w/o patch      rate w/patch
> (bytes)      (Mbits/sec)         (Mbits/sec)
> -------      ----------          ---------
> 400            503                 353
> 200            239                  88
> 100            122                  44
>  60             73                  26
> 
> That's not quite a 3x performance degradation.
> 
> In addition, with your patch, the number of interrupts jumps
> from just about zero, to about 55K/second. From what I can tell, 
> this huge interrupt rate eats up all the CPU cycles, which is
> why the performance drops so drasically.

I understand the influence for performance by setting GDTDCEDIS and
why you set this bit.

> > We met some troubles on Celleb platform by setting this flag.
> >  -network does not recover after ifconfig down, then up operations.
> 
> Can you be more specific?  I can't imagine why this flag would
> have anything to do with ifdown/ifup. The device open/close 
> routines should reset all hardware state; this shouldn't make
> any difference. (It doesn't for me, at least).  

Sorry, I have no more information that ifconfig down/up commands. All
about I know is that I met the phenomenon when GDTDCEDIS is set.

I need more investigation. Please drop the patch.

Best regards,
Kou Ishizaki