Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 11:05:03AM +0800, Sepherosa Ziehau wrote:
 > On 7/1/08, Paul <paul at gtcomm.net> wrote:
 > > All the NIC drivers in 7 pretty much use interrupt moderation so it can
 > 
 > I am not quite sure whether em(4)'s RX interrupt moderation works as
 > expected or not.  But, AFAIK, nfe(4) and re(4) does not have RX
 > interrupt moderation.  Their TX interrupt moderation could be mimiced
 > by using their hardware timer and disabling their TX interrupt.
 > 
 > The lacking of RX im is difficult to handle, I could imagine following way:
 > - During init, enable RX intr
 > - When RX intr comes, disable RX intr and set up hardware timer intr
 > - When timer intr comes and no RX happens, disable timer intr and enable RX intr
 > 

I guess adaptive polling would give the same effect withtout
sacrificing CPU cycles.

 > Properly configured #RX desc and timer intr interval will be required
 > to make sure that the RX desc collection could keep up with the
 > hardware speed.  I used pure timer intr (8000Hz) on nfe(4) in dfly w/
 > good result, i.e. TX/RX @linespeed without livelocking the system.

I thought that too for a while but I prefer to hardware intertrrupt
moderation feature. Of course I still have no clue how to enable
that interrupt feature on nvidia controllers. :-(

 > The drawback of pure timer intr is that you waste extra cpu power,
 > when there is nothing to process.
 > 
 > > never lock the machine anyway.. This effectively kills polling and it really
 > > no longer has any use except to be able to have a fraction of the cpu set
 > 
 > Oh?  Really? :]
 > 
 > Best Regards,
 > sephe
 > 
 > -- 
 > Live Free or Die
-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon