Re: problems with e1000 and jumboframes

[Chris Leech]

> Maximum e1000 frame is 16128 bytes, which is enough before being rounded
> to 16k to have a space for shared info.
> My patch just tricks refilling logic to request to allocate slightly less
> than was setup when mtu was changed.

The maximum supported MTU size differs between e1000 devices due to
differences in FIFO size.  For performance reasons the driver won't
enable a MTU that doesn't allow for at least two frames in the Tx FIFO
at once - you really want e1000 to be able to DMA the next frame into
Tx FIFO while the current one is going out on the wire.  This doesn't
change the fact that with LPE set, anything that can fit into the Rx
FIFO and has a valid CRC will be DMAed into buffers regardless of
length.

> Hardware is not affected, second patch just checks if there is enough
> space (e1000 stores real mtu). I can not believe that such modern NIC
> like e1000 can not know in receive interrupt size of the received
> packet, if it is true, than in generel you are right and some more
> clever mechanisms shoud be used (at least turn hack off for small
> packets and only enable it for less than 16 jumbo frames wheere place
> always is), if size of the received packet is known, then it is enough
> to compare aligned size and size of the packet to make a decision for
> allocation.

You're changing the size of the buffer without telling the hardware.
In the interrupt context e1000 knows the size of what was DMAed into
the skb, but that's after the fact.  So e1000 could detect that memory
was corrupted, but not prevent it if you don't give it power of 2
buffers.  Actually, the power of 2 thing doesn't hold true for all
e1000 devices.  Some have 1k granularity, but not Arnd's 82540.

You can't know the size of a received packet before it's DMAed into
host memory, no high performance network controller works that way.

- Chris
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