From: Jesper Dangaard Brouer
The network stack have some use-cases that puts some extreme demands
on the memory allocator. One use-case, 10Gbit/s wirespeed at smallest
packet size[1], requires handling a packet every 67.2 ns (nanosec).
Micro benchmarking[2] the SLUB allocator (with skb size 256bytes
elements), show "fast-path" instant reuse only costs 19 ns, but a
closer to network usage pattern show the cost rise to 45 ns.
This patchset introduce a quick mempool (qmempool), which when used
in-front of the SKB (sk_buff) kmem_cache, saves 12 ns on "fast-path"
drop in iptables "raw" table, but more importantly saves 40 ns with
IP-forwarding, which were hitting the slower SLUB use-case.
One of the building blocks for achieving this speedup is a cmpxchg
based Lock-Free queue that supports bulking, named alf_queue for
Array-based Lock-Free queue. By bulking elements (pointers) from the
queue, the cost of the cmpxchg (approx 8 ns) is amortized over several
elements.
It seems to me that these improvements could be added to the
underlying allocator itself.
Nesting allocators doesn't really seem right to me.
David
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