Re: [PATCH net-next 2/2] virtio-net: simplify XDP handling in small buffer

From: Jason Wang
Date: Thu Mar 01 2018 - 03:49:40 EST




On 2018å03æ01æ 16:02, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
On Thu, 1 Mar 2018 11:19:05 +0800 Jason Wang <jasowang@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We used to do data copy through xdp_linearize_page() for the buffer
without sufficient headroom, it brings extra complexity without
helping for the performance. So this patch remove it and switch to use
generic XDP routine to handle this case.
I don't like where this is going. I don't like intermixing the native
XDP and generic XDP in this way, for several reasons:

1. XDP generic is not feature complete, e.g. cpumap will drop these
packets.

Well, then we'd better fix it, otherwise it would be even worse than not having it. For cpumap, it can be done through queuing skb in the pointer ring with some encoding/decoding.

It might not be possible to implement some features, think
of (AF_XDP) zero-copy.

Yes, but can AF_XDP support header adjustment? Consider the assumption of zerocopy, I was considering maybe we need a way to tell AF_XDP of whether or not zerocopy is supported by the driver.


2. This can easily cause out-of-order packets.

I may miss something, but it looks to me packets were still delivered in order? Or you mean the packets that was dropped by cpumap?


3. It makes it harder to troubleshoot, when diagnosing issues
around #1, we have a hard time determining what path an XDP packet
took (the xdp tracepoints doesn't know).

Looks like we can address this by adding tracepoints in generic code path.



[...]
@@ -590,25 +526,14 @@ static struct sk_buff *receive_small(struct net_device *dev,
if (unlikely(hdr->hdr.gso_type))
goto err_xdp;
+ /* This happnes when headroom is not enough because
+ * the buffer was refilled before XDP is set. This
+ * only happen for several packets, for simplicity,
+ * offload them to generic XDP routine.
In my practical tests, I also saw that sometime my ping packets were
traveling this code-path, even after a long time when XDP were attached.

I don't see this, probably a bug somewhere. I would like to reproduce and see, how do you do the test? If there's just very few packets were received after XDP, we may still use the buffer that was refilled before XDP, that's by design.


This worries me a bit, for troubleshooting purposes... as this can give
a strange user experience given point #1.



I can stick to the xdp_linearize_page() logic if you don't like generic XDP stuffs, but it may not work for AF_XDP neither. Consider AF_XDP has still some distance of being merged, I'm not sure we could even care about it.

Thanks



+ */
if (unlikely(xdp_headroom < virtnet_get_headroom(vi))) {
- int offset = buf - page_address(page) + header_offset;
- unsigned int tlen = len + vi->hdr_len;
- u16 num_buf = 1;