Re: [PATCH 1/1] net: ethernet: davinci_cpdma: Add boundary for rx and tx descriptors

Hi again,

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Mugunthan V N [off-list ref] wrote:

When there is heavy transmission traffic in the CPDMA, then Rx descriptors
memory is also utilized as tx desc memory this leads to reduced rx desc memory
which leads to poor performance.

"poor performance" is an understatement, see Sascha's description of
his patch. At initialization of the driver, half of the descriptors in
the pool are allocated for rx. When a packet arrives, one of the rx
descriptors is released and a new one is allocated. If tx allocates
this descriptor in the meantime, it is lost for rx forever! If tx
consumes all rx descriptors this way, the rx channel is dead!

Regards, Christian

This patch adds boundary for tx and rx descriptors in bd ram dividing the
descriptor memory to ensure that during heavy transmission tx doesn't use
rx descriptors.

This patch is already applied to davinci_emac driver, since CPSW and
davici_dmac uses the same CPDMA, moving the boundry seperation from
Davinci EMAC driver to CPDMA driver which was done in the following
commit

commit 86d8c07ff2448eb4e860e50f34ef6ee78e45c40c
Author: Sascha Hauer [off-list ref]
Date:   Tue Jan 3 05:27:47 2012 +0000

    net/davinci: do not use all descriptors for tx packets

    The driver uses a shared pool for both rx and tx descriptors.
    During open it queues fixed number of 128 descriptors for receive
    packets. For each received packet it tries to queue another
    descriptor. If this fails the descriptor is lost for rx.
    The driver has no limitation on tx descriptors to use, so it
    can happen during a nmap / ping -f attack that the driver
    allocates all descriptors for tx and looses all rx descriptors.
    The driver stops working then.
    To fix this limit the number of tx descriptors used to half of
    the descriptors available, the rx path uses the other half.

    Tested on a custom board using nmap / ping -f to the board from
    two different hosts.

Signed-off-by: Mugunthan V N <redacted>