> On Nov 21, 2016, at 4:48 AM, Damjan Marion (damarion) <damarion at cisco.com> > wrote: > > > Hi, > > Currently in VPP we do memcpy of whole packet when we need to do > replication as we cannot know if specific buffer is transmitted > from tx ring before we update it again (i.e. l2 header rewrite). > > Unless there is already a way to address this issue in DPDK which I?m not > aware > of my proposal is that we provide mechanism for polling TX ring > for consumed buffers. This can be either completely new API or > extension of rte_etx_tx_burst (i.e. special case when nb_pkts=0). > > This will allows us to start polling tx ring when we expect some > mbuf back, instead of waiting for next tx burst (which we don?t know > when it will happen) and hoping that we will reach free_threshold soon.
+1 In Pktgen I have the problem of not being able to reclaim all of the TX mbufs to update them for the next set of packets to send. I know this is not a common case, but I do see the case where the application needs its mbufs freed off the TX ring. Currently you need to have at least a TX ring size of mbufs on hand to make sure you can send to a TX ring. If you allocate too few you run into a deadlock case as the number of mbufs on a TX ring does not hit the flush mark. If you are sending to multiple TX rings on the same numa node from the a single TX pool you have to understand the total number of mbufs you need to have allocated to hit the TX flush on each ring. Not a clean way to handle the problems as you may have limited memory or require some logic to add more mbufs for dynamic ports. Anyway it would be great to require a way to clean up the TX done ring, using nb_pkts == 0 is the simplest way, but a new API is fine too. > > Any thoughts? > > Thanks, > > Damjan > > > Regards, Keith
