Re: [PATCH net-next 3/3] net: stmmac: Introducing support for Page Pool

From: Ilias Apalodimas
Date: Thu Jul 04 2019 - 09:06:42 EST


Hi Jose,

> Thank you all for your review comments !
>
> From: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> > That's why i was concerned on what will happen on > 1000b frames and what the
> > memory pressure is going to be.
> > The trade off here is copying vs mapping/unmapping.
>
> Well, the performance numbers I mentioned are for TSO with default MTU
> (1500) and using iperf3 with zero-copy. Here follows netperf:
>

Ok i guess this should be fine. Here's why.
You'll allocate an extra memory from page pool API which equals
the number of descriptors * 1 page.
You also allocate SKB's to copy the data and recycle the page pool buffers.
So page_pool won't add any significant memory pressure since we expect *all*
it's buffers to be recycled.
The SKBs are allocated anyway in the current driver so bottom line you trade off
some memory (the page_pool buffers) + a memcpy per packet and skip the dma
map/unmap which is the bottleneck in your hardware.
I think it's fine

Cheers
/Ilias