Interrupts + Polling mode (similar to Linux's NAPI)

[Fabien Thomas]

Le 28 avr. 09 à 11:04, Paolo Pisati a écrit :

> Fabien Thomas wrote:
>>
>> To share my results:
>>
>> I have done at work modification to the polling code to do SMP  
>> polling (previously posted to this ml).
>>
>> SMP polling (dynamic group of interface binded to CPU) does not  
>> significantly improve the throughput (lock contention seems to be  
>> the cause here).
>> The main advantage of polling with modern interface is not the PPS  
>> (which is nearly the same) but the global efficiency of the system  
>> when using multiple interfaces (which is the case for Firewall).
>> The best configuration we have found with FreeBSD 6.3 is to do  
>> polling on one CPU and keep the other CPU free for other  
>> processing. In this configuration the whole system
>> is more efficient than with interrupt where all the CPU are busy  
>> processing interrupt thread.
> out of curiosity: did you try polling on 4.x? i know it doesn't  
> "support" SMP over there, but last time i tried polling on 7.x (or  
> was it 6.x? i don't remember...)
> i found it didn't gave any benefit, while switching the system to  
> 4.x showed a huge improvement.
>

yes rewriting the core polling code started at half because the  
polling code on 6.x and up perform badly (in our env) regarding  
performance.
today 4.x is unbeatable regarding network perf  (6.2 -> 7.0 at least,  
i need to do more test on 7_stable and 8).

the other half  of the work was to explore the SMP scaling of the  
polling code to gain what we loose with fine grained SMP kernel.

> -- 
>
> bye,
> P.
>
>