Re: [PATCH net-next] virtio_net: Add TX stop and wake counters
From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Date: 2024-02-02 16:01:27
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netdev
On Fri, 2 Feb 2024 14:52:59 +0800 Jason Xing wrote:
quoted
Can you say more? I'm curious what's your use case.I'm not working at Nvidia, so my point of view may differ from theirs. From what I can tell is that those two counters help me narrow down the range if I have to diagnose/debug some issues.
right, i'm asking to collect useful debugging tricks, nothing against the patch itself :)
1) I sometimes notice that if some irq is held too long (say, one simple case: output of printk printed to the console), those two counters can reflect the issue. 2) Similarly in virtio net, recently I traced such counters the current kernel does not have and it turned out that one of the output queues in the backend behaves badly. ... Stop/wake queue counters may not show directly the root cause of the issue, but help us 'guess' to some extent.
I'm surprised you say you can detect stall-related issues with this. I guess virtio doesn't have BQL support, which makes it special. Normal HW drivers with BQL almost never stop the queue by themselves. I mean - if they do, and BQL is active, then the system is probably misconfigured (queue is too short). This is what we use at Meta to detect stalls in drivers with BQL: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240131102150.728960-3-leitao@debian.org/ (local) Daniel, I think this may be a good enough excuse to add per-queue stats to the netdev genl family, if you're up for that. LMK if you want more info, otherwise I guess ethtool -S is fine for now.