Re: [PATCH net-next 2/3] mlx4_en: moderate frequency of TX completions

On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 21:13 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:

On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 14:44 -0500, David Miller wrote:

quoted

From: Yevgeny Petrilin <redacted>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:34:27 +0200

quoted

No need to ask for completion for every packet being sent.
So the method is to ask for a completion every 16 packets,
or when the queue is about to be full.

Signed-off-by: Yevgeny Petrilin <redacted>

You absolutely cannot do this, you must signal completion and free up
TX queue packets in a finite amount of time.

Really, sfc has been doing this forever.

Ben.

quoted

This means that if you suddenly stop getting new packets to send
you must still free up all the pending TX SKBs even if no more
packets are given to the driver.

Does your hardware unconditionally give a TX completion interrupt when
the TX queue empties completely?  If not, then you cannot make the
change contained in this patch.

And it's pretty obvious the hardware has to also send a completion when
the queue is empty.  I hope.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.