On Wed, 6 Feb 2019 00:06:33 +0000
Saeed Mahameed [off-list ref] wrote:

3) Unrelated, In non XDP case, if skb allocation fails or driver fails
to pass the skb up to the stack for somereason, should the driver
increase rx packets ? IMHO the answer should be yes if we want to have
similar behavior between XDP and non XDP cases.

I don't think "skb allocation fails" should increase rx packets
counter.  The difference is that these events are outside sysadm/users
control, and is an error detected inside the driver.  The XDP program
takes a policy choice to XDP_DROP a packet, which can be accounted
inside the XDP prog (as the samples show) or as we also discuss via a
more generic XDP-action counters.

That said, I took at quick look at driver code, and it seems this
behavior differs per driver... ixgbe and mlx5 does not count "skb
allocation fails" as RX-ed packets, while mlx4 seems to count them.

But this could result in netdev->stats.rx_packets +
netdev->stats.rx_dropped to be more than the actual rx-ed packets, is
this acceptable ?

This is one reasons I think this is wrong.

--Jesper