Re: [net-next PATCH v2 0/8] Add busy poll support for epoll

[Alexei Starovoitov]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 02:36:29PM -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> This is my second pass at trying to add support for busy polling when using
> epoll. It is pretty much a full rewrite as I have made serious changes to
> most of the patches.
> 
> In the v1 series I had submitted we only allowed epoll to make use of busy
> poll when all NAPI IDs were the same. I gave this some more thought and
> after making several other changes based on feedback from Eric Dumazet I
> decided to try changing the main concept a bit and instead we will now
> attempt to busy poll on the NAPI ID of the last socket added to the ready
> list. By doing it this way we are able to take advantage of the changes
> Eric has already made so that we get woken up by the softirq, we then pull
> packets via busy poll, and will return to the softirq until we are woken up
> and a new socket has been added to the ready list.
> 
> Most of the changes in this set authored by me are meant to be cleanup or
> fixes for various things. For example, I am trying to make it so that we
> don't perform hash look-ups for the NAPI instance when we are only working
> with sender_cpu and the like.
> 
> The most complicated change of the set is probably the clean-ups for the
> timeout. I realized that the timeout could potentially get into a state
> where it would never timeout if the local_clock() was approaching a
> rollover and the added busy poll usecs interval would be enough to roll it
> over.  Because we were shifting the value you would never be able to get
> time_after to actually trigger.
> 
> At the heart of this set is the last 3 patches which enable epoll support
> and add support for obtaining the NAPI ID of a given socket.  With these
> It becomes possible for an application to make use of epoll and get optimal
> busy poll utilization by stacking multiple sockets with the same NAPI ID on
> the same epoll context.

it all sounds awesome, but i cannot quite visualize the impact.
Can you post some sample code/minibenchmark and numbers before/after?

Thanks!