Re: Question about QoS hardware offload

On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 12:46 PM Naveen Mamindlapalli
[off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

Our NIC hardware provides a hierarchical QoS tree for each physical
link with strict
priority and DRR scheduling & also supports traffic shaping at each
level. I'm curious what the closest qdisc that supports the above
functionalities for offloading to hardware. I looked into htb/drr/prio
qdiscs, but each qdisc supports a subset of the functionality enabled
by our hardware.

As per my understanding, The HTB hardware offload is used for shaping
rather than scheduling (strict priority/DRR).

Correct.

The PRIO qdisc seems to support strict priority but not DRR. Similarly
DRR doesn't support strict priority.

My assumption is your hardware does not do 5 tuple FQ for the DRR, but
leverages the dscp field?

Instead, linux pretty much does a 5 tuple hash universally now for
packet steering (RPS) and in the sch_fq and fq_codel qdiscs.

I am not really big on strict priority with dscp, as whenever someone
lucks into the right dscp value they get most of the bandwidth, and
it's
more or less a matter of historical accident that the support in
mqprio/pfifo_fast is not more abused in the field. But that's me.

Please advise on how to effectively offload all the features.

Is the ETS - Enhanced Transmission Selection scheduler a better fit if
we simply need to offload scheduling with strict priority and DRR?

Of course, my dream is to see 5 tuple fq-codel or cake land in some
offload somewhere.

I don't know enough about how when and where ets is used, it's pretty
new, and I'd lke to know more.

Thanks,
Naveen

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