Re: [RFC Patch net-next v1 0/9] r8169: add RSS support for RTL8127

From: FUKAUMI Naoki

Date: Mon Apr 20 2026 - 07:15:06 EST


Hi Javen,

Thank you very much for your nice work!

On 4/20/26 11:19, javen wrote:
From: Javen Xu <javen_xu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

This series patch adds RSS support for RTL8127 in the r8169 driver.

Currently, without RSS support, a single CPU core handles all incoming
traffic. Under heavy loads, this single core becomes a bottleneck, causing
high softirq usage and leading to unstable and degraded network throughput.

As a result, we add rss support for RTL8127. This RFC patch is just for
discussing. And we do some experiments on AMD platform. Below is the
result.

Platform: AMD Ryzen Embedded R2514 with Radeon Graphics(4 Cores/8 Threads)
Arch: x86_64
Test command:
Server: iperf3 -s
Client: iperf3 -c 192.168.2.1 -P 20 -t 3600
Monitor: mpstat -P ALL 1

Before this patch (Without RSS):
Throughput: Unstable, fluctuating between 3.76 Gbits/sec and
8.2 Gbits/sec.
CPU Usage: A single CPU core is fully occupied with softirq reaching
up to 96%.

After this patch (With RSS enabled):
Throughput: Stable at 9.42 Gbits/sec.
CPU Usage: The traffic load is evenly distributed across multiple CPU
cores. The maximum softirq on a single core dropped to 63%.

Platform: Radxa ROCK 5T (RK3588: 4x Cortex-A76, 4x Cortex-A55)
Arch: aarch64
Configuration: smp_affinity is set to use only the big cores.

Vanilla Linux v7.0:
Throughput: 5.5 Gbps (4.3 Gbps with -P 20)
CPU Usage: ~100% on a single A76 core.

Linux v7.0 + this patch series:
Throughput: 9.4 Gbps with -P 20
CPU Usage: distributed across all four A76 cores.

Looks good to me!

Feel free to use:
Tested-by: FUKAUMI Naoki <naoki@xxxxxxxxx>

Best regards,

--
FUKAUMI Naoki
Radxa Computer (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.

Patch summary:
Patch 1: Adds necessary macro and register definitions for RSS.
Patch 2-4: Support NAPI and multi RX/TX queues.
Patch 5-6: Support MSI-X and enables it specifically for RTL8127.
Patch 7: Enables RSS for RTL8127.
Patch 8-9: Adds ethtool support to configure the number of RX queues.
Javen Xu (9):
r8169: add some register definitions
r8169: add napi and irq support
r8169: add support for multi tx queues
r8169: add support for multi rx queues
r8169: add support for msix
r8169: enable msix for RTL8127
r8169: add support and enable rss
r8169: move struct ethtool_ops
r8169: add support for ethtool

drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/r8169_main.c | 1437 ++++++++++++++++++---
1 file changed, 1238 insertions(+), 199 deletions(-)