On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 at 09:30, Björn Töpel [off-list ref] wrote:

This series introduces three new features:

1. A new "heavy traffic" busy-polling variant that works in concert
   with the existing napi_defer_hard_irqs and gro_flush_timeout knobs.

2. A new socket option that let a user change the busy-polling NAPI
   budget.

3. Allow busy-polling to be performed on XDP sockets.

The existing busy-polling mode, enabled by the SO_BUSY_POLL socket
option or system-wide using the /proc/sys/net/core/busy_read knob, is
an opportunistic. That means that if the NAPI context is not
scheduled, it will poll it. If, after busy-polling, the budget is
exceeded the busy-polling logic will schedule the NAPI onto the
regular softirq handling.

One implication of the behavior above is that a busy/heavy loaded NAPI
context will never enter/allow for busy-polling. Some applications
prefer that most NAPI processing would be done by busy-polling.

This series adds a new socket option, SO_PREFER_BUSY_POLL, that works
in concert with the napi_defer_hard_irqs and gro_flush_timeout
knobs. The napi_defer_hard_irqs and gro_flush_timeout knobs were
introduced in commit 6f8b12d661d0 ("net: napi: add hard irqs deferral
feature"), and allows for a user to defer interrupts to be enabled and
instead schedule the NAPI context from a watchdog timer. When a user
enables the SO_PREFER_BUSY_POLL, again with the other knobs enabled,
and the NAPI context is being processed by a softirq, the softirq NAPI
processing will exit early to allow the busy-polling to be performed.

If the application stops performing busy-polling via a system call,
the watchdog timer defined by gro_flush_timeout will timeout, and
regular softirq handling will resume.

In summary; Heavy traffic applications that prefer busy-polling over
softirq processing should use this option.

Eric/Jakub, any more thoughts/input? Tomatoes? :-P


Thank you,
Björn