The connected mode implementation in the IPoIB driver has a large
overhead in the way SKBs are handled in the receive flow. It usually
allocates an SKB with as big as was used in the currently received SKB
and moves unused fragments from the old SKB to the new one. This
involves a loop on all the remaining fragments and incurs overhead on
the CPU. This patch, for small SKBs, allocates an SKB just large
enough to contain the received data and copies to it the data from the
received SKB. The newly allocated SKB is passed to the stack and the
old SKB is reposted.
When running netperf, UDP small messages, without this pach I get:
UDP UNIDIRECTIONAL SEND TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to
14.4.3.178 (14.4.3.178) port 0 AF_INET
Socket Message Elapsed Messages
Size Size Time Okay Errors Throughput
bytes bytes secs # # 10^6bits/sec
114688 128 10.00 5142034 0 526.31
114688 10.00 1130489 115.71
With this patch I get both send and receive at ~315 mbps.
The reason that send performance actually slows down is as follows:
When using this patch, the overhead of the CPU for handling RX packets
is dramatically reduced. As a result, we do not experience RNR NAK
messages from the receiver which cause the connection to be closed and
reopened again; when the patch is not used, the receiver cannot handle
the packets fast enough so there is less time to post new buffers and
hence the mentioned RNR NACKs. So what happens is that the
application *thinks* it posted a certain number of packets for
transmission but these packets are flushed and do not really get
transmitted. Since the connection gets opened and closed many times,
each time netperf gets the CPU time that otherwise would have been
given to IPoIB to actually transmit the packets. This can be verified
when looking at the port counters -- the output of ifconfig and the
oputput of netperf (this is for the case without the patch):
tx packets
==========
port counter: 1,543,996
ifconfig: 1,581,426
netperf: 5,142,034
rx packets
==========
netperf 1,1304,089
Signed-off-by: Eli Cohen <eli@mellanox.co.il>
Eli Cohen