Re: [PATCH net-next v3 0/5] page_pool: recycle buffers

[Ilias Apalodimas]

(-cc invalid emails)
Replying to my self here but....

[...]
> > >
> > > We can't do that. The reason we need those structs is that we rely on the
> > > existing XDP code, which already recycles it's buffers, to enable
> > > recycling.  Since we allocate a page per packet when using page_pool for a
> > > driver , the same ideas apply to an SKB and XDP frame. We just recycle the
> >
> > I am not really familar with XDP here, but a packet from hw is either a
> > "struct xdp_frame/xdp_buff" for XDP or a "struct sk_buff" for TCP/IP stack,
> > a packet can not be both "struct xdp_frame/xdp_buff" and "struct sk_buff" at
> > the same time, right?
> >
>
> Yes, but the payload is irrelevant in both cases and that's what we use
> page_pool for.  You can't use this patchset unless your driver usues
> build_skb().  So in both cases you just allocate memory for the payload and
> decide what the wrap the buffer with (XDP or SKB) later.
>
> > What does not really make sense to me is that the page has to be from page
> > pool when a skb's frag page can be recycled, right? If it is ture, the switch
> > case in __xdp_return() does not really make sense for skb recycling, why go
> > all the trouble of checking the mem->type and mem->id to find the page_pool
> > pointer when recyclable page for skb can only be from page pool?
>
> In any case you need to find in which pool the buffer you try to recycle
> belongs.  In order to make the whole idea generic and be able to recycle skb
> fragments instead of just the skb head you need to store some information on
> struct page.  That's the fundamental difference of this patchset compared to
> the RFC we sent a few years back [1] which was just storing information on the
> skb.  The way this is done on the current patchset is that we store the
> struct xdp_mem_info in page->private and then look it up on xdp_return().
>
> Now that being said Matthew recently reworked struct page, so we could see if
> we can store the page pool pointer directly instead of the struct
> xdp_mem_info. That would allow us to call into page pool functions directly.
> But we'll have to agree if that makes sense to go into struct page to begin
> with and make sure the pointer is still valid when we take the recycling path.
>

Thinking more about it the reason that prevented us from storing a
page pool pointer directly is not there anymore. Jesper fixed that
already a while back. So we might as well store the page_pool ptr in
page->private and call into the functions directly.  I'll have a look
before v4.

[...]

Thanks
/Ilias