Please provide feedback on the code and/or architecture. They are now updated to work with the latest rebased net-2.6.24 from a few hours ago. I am on travel mode so wont have time to do more testing for the next few days - i do consider this to be stable at this point based on what i have been testing (famous last words).
Patch 1: Introduces batching interface Patch 2: Core uses batching interface Patch 3: get rid of dev->gso_skb What has changed since i posted last: ------------------------------------- 1) There was some cruft leftover from prep_frame feature that i forgot to remove last time - it is now gone. 2) In the shower this AM, i realized that it is plausible that a batch of packets sent to the driver may all be dropped because they are badly formatted. Current drivers all return NETDEV_TX_OK in all such cases. This will lead for us to call dev->hard_end_xmit() to be invoked unnecessarily. I already had a NETDEV_TX_DROPPED within batching drivers, so i made that global and make the batching drivers return it if they drop packets. The core calls dev->hard_end_xmit() when at least one packet makes it through. Things i am gonna say that nobody will see (wink) ------------------------------------------------- Dave please let me know if this meets your desires to allow devices which are SG and able to compute CSUM benefit just in case i misunderstood. Herbert, if you can look at at least patch 3 i will appreaciate it (since it kills dev->gso_skb that you introduced). UPCOMING PATCHES --------------- As before: More patches to follow later if i get some feedback - i didnt want to overload people by dumping too many patches. Most of these patches mentioned below are ready to go; some need some re-testing and others need a little porting from an earlier kernel: - tg3 driver - tun driver - pktgen - netiron driver - e1000e driver (non-LLTX) - ethtool interface - There is at least one other driver promised to me Theres also a driver-howto that i will post soon today. PERFORMANCE TESTING -------------------- System under test hardware is still a 2xdual core opteron with a couple of tg3s. A test tool generates udp traffic of different sizes for upto 60 seconds per run or a total of 30M packets. I have 4 threads each running on a specific CPU which keep all the CPUs as busy as they can sending packets targetted at a directly connected box's udp discard port. All 4 CPUs target a single tg3 to send. The receiving box has a tc rule which counts and drops all incoming udp packets to discard port - this allows me to make sure that the receiver is not the bottleneck in the testing. Packet sizes sent are {8B, 32B, 64B, 128B, 256B, 512B, 1024B}. Each packet size run is repeated 10 times to ensure that there are no transients. The average of all 10 runs is then computed and collected. I do plan also to run forwarding and TCP tests in the future when the dust settles. cheers, jamal - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html