RFC: issues concerning the next NAPI interface

[James Chapman]

Jan-Bernd Themann wrote:
> Hi David
> 
> David Miller schrieb:
>> Interrupt mitigation only works if it helps you avoid interrupts.
>> This scheme potentially makes more of them happen.
>>
>> The hrtimer is just another interrupt, a cpu locally triggered one,
>> but it has much of the same costs nonetheless.
>>
>> So if you set this timer, it triggers, and no packets arrive, you are
>> taking more interrupts and doing more work than if you had disabled
>> NAPI.
>>
>> In fact, for certain packet rates, your scheme would result in
>> twice as many interrupts than the current scheme
>>   
> That depends how smart the driver switches between timer
> polling and plain NAPI (depending on load situation).
>> This is one of several reasons why hardware is the only truly proper
>> place for this kind of logic.  Only the hardware can see the packet
>> arrive, and do the interrupt deferral without any cpu intervention
>> whatsoever.
>>   
> What I'm trying to improve with this approach is interrupt
> mitigation for NICs where the hardware support for interrupt
> mitigation is limited. I'm not trying to improve this for NICs
> that work well with the means their HW provides. I'm aware of
> the fact that this scheme has it's tradeoffs and certainly
> can not be as good as a HW approach.
> So I'm grateful for any ideas that do have less tradeoffs and
> provide a mechanism to reduce interrupts without depending on
> HW support of the NIC.
> 
> In the end I want to reduce the CPU utilization. And one way
> to do that is LRO which also works only well if there are more
> then just a very few packets to aggregate. So at least our
> driver (eHEA) would benefit from a mix of timer based polling
> and plain NAPI (depending on load situations).

Wouldn't you achieve the same result by enabling hardware interrupt 
mitigation in eHEA in combination with NAPI? Presumably a 10G interface 
has hardware mitigation features?

> If there is no need for a generic mechanism for this kind of
> network adapters, then we can just leave this to each device
> driver.

I've been looking at this from a different angle. My goal is to optimize 
NAPI packet forwarding rates while minimizing packet latency. Using 
hardware interrupt mitigation hurts latency so I'm investigating ways to 
turn it off without risking NAPI poll on/off thrashing at certain packet 
rates.

Jan-Bernd, I think I've found a solution to the issue that you 
highlighted with my scheme yesterday and it doesn't involve generating 
other interrupts using hrtimers etc. :) Initial results are very 
encouraging in my setups. Would you be willing to test it with eHEA? I 
don't have a 10G setup. If results are encouraging, I'll post an RFC to 
ask for review / feedback from the NAPI experts here. What do you think?

-- 
James Chapman
Katalix Systems Ltd
http://www.katalix.com
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