Re: [Question] ixgbe:Mechanism of RSS

From: Jakub Kicinski
Date: Thu Jan 02 2025 - 11:41:04 EST


On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 16:01:18 +0000 Edward Cree wrote:
> On 02/01/2025 11:23, Haifeng Xu wrote:
> > We want to make full use of cpu resources to receive packets. So
> > we enable 63 rx queues. But we found the rate of interrupt growth
> > on cpu 0~15 is faster than other cpus(almost twice).
> ...
> > I am confused that why ixgbe NIC can dispatch the packets
> > to the rx queues that not specified in RSS configuration.
>
> Hypothesis: it isn't doing so, RX is only happening on cpus (and
> queues) 0-15, but the other CPUs are still sending traffic and
> thus getting TX completion interrupts from their TX queues.
> `ethtool -S` output has per-queue traffic stats which should
> confirm this.
>
> (But Eric is right that if you _want_ RX to use every CPU you
> should just change the indirection table.)

IIRC Niantic had 4 bit entries in the RSS table or some such.
It wasn't possible to RSS across more than 16 queues at a time.
It's a great NIC but a bit dated at this point.