Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] TCP/IP Critical socket communication mechanism

From: Sridhar Samudrala
Date: Thu Dec 15 2005 - 02:36:58 EST


On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, David S. Miller wrote:

> From: Matt Mackall <mpm@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:39:37 -0800
>
> > I think we need a global receive pool and per-socket send pools.
>
> Mind telling everyone how you plan to make use of the global receive
> pool when the allocation happens in the device driver and we have no
> idea which socket the packet is destined for? What should be done for
> non-local packets being routed? The device drivers allocate packets
> for the entire system, long before we know who the eventually received
> packets are for. It is fully anonymous memory, and it's easy to
> design cases where the whole pool can be eaten up by non-local
> forwarded packets.
>
> I truly dislike these patches being discussed because they are a
> complete hack, and admittedly don't even solve the problem fully. I
> don't have any concrete better ideas but that doesn't mean this stuff
> should go into the tree.
>
> I think GFP_ATOMIC memory pools are more powerful than they are given
> credit for. There is nothing preventing the implementation of dynamic
> GFP_ATOMIC watermarks, and having "critical" socket behavior "kick in"
> in response to hitting those water marks.

Does this mean that you are OK with having a mechanism to mark the
sockets as critical and dropping the non critical packets under
emergency, but you do not like having a separate critical page pool.

Instead, you seem to be suggesting in_emergency to be set dynamically
when we are about to run out of ATOMIC memory. Is this right?

Thanks
Sridhar
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/