[PATCH 00/15] Kill the routing cache.
From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Date: 2012-07-18 18:22:45
And I'm really serious this time :-) The general flow of this patch series is that first the routing cache is removed. We build a completely new rtable entry every lookup request. Next we make some simplifications due to the fact that removing the routing cache causes several members of struct rtable to become no longer necessary. Then we need to make some amends such that we can legally cache pre-constructed routes in the FIB nexthops. Firstly, we need to invalidate routes which are hit with nexthop exceptions. Secondly we have to change the semantics of rt->rt_gateway such that zero means that the destination is on-link and non-zero otherwise. Now that the preparations are ready, we start caching precomputed routes in the FIB nexthops. Output and input routes need different kinds of care when determining if we can legally do such caching or not. The details are in the commit log messages for those changes. The patch series then winds down with some more struct rtable simplifications and other tidy ups that remove unnecessary overhead. On a SPARC-T3 output route lookups are ~870 cycles. Input route lookups are ~970 cycles with rpfilter disabled, and about ~1400 with rpfilter enabled. These measurements were taken with the kbench_mod test module in the net_test_tools GIT tree: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net_test_tools.git Performance can easily be improved further. For example fib_table_lookup() performs a lot of excessive computations with all the masking and shifting, some of it conditionalized to deal with edge cases. Also, Eric's no-ref optimization for input route lookups can be re-instated for the FIB nexthop caching code path. I would be really pleased if someone would work on that. In fact anyone suitable motivated can just fire up perf on the loading of the test net_test_tools benchmark kernel module. I spend much of my time going: bash# perf record insmod ./kbench_mod.ko dst=172.30.42.22 src=74.128.0.1 iif=2 bash# perf report Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>