"Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 05/05/2011 02:53:59 AM: > > Not "hope" exactly. If the device is not ready, then > > the packet is requeued. The main idea is to avoid > > drops/stop/starts, etc. > > Yes, I see that, definitely. I guess it's a win if the > interrupt takes at least a jiffy to arrive anyway, > and a loss if not. Is there some reason interrupts > might be delayed until the next jiffy? I can explain this a bit as I have three debug counters in start_xmit() just for this: 1. Whether the current xmit call was good, i.e. we had returned BUSY last time and this xmit was successful. 2. Whether the current xmit call was bad, i.e. we had returned BUSY last time and this xmit still failed. 3. The free capacity when we *resumed* xmits. This is after calling free_old_xmit_skbs where this function is not throttled, in effect it processes *all* the completed skbs. This counter is a sum: if (If_I_had_returned_EBUSY_last_iteration) free_slots += virtqueue_get_capacity(); The counters after a 30 min run of 1K,2K,16K netperf sessions are: Good: 1059172 Bad: 31226 Sum of slots: 47551557 (Total of Good+Bad tallies with the total number of requeues as shown by tc: qdisc pfifo_fast 0: root refcnt 2 bands 3 priomap 1 2 2 2 1 2 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Sent 1560854473453 bytes 1075873684 pkt (dropped 718379, overlimits 0 requeues 1090398) backlog 0b 0p requeues 1090398 ) It shows that 2.9% of the time, the 1 jiffy was not enough to free up space in the txq. That could also mean that we had set xmit_restart just before jiffies changed. But the average free capacity when we *resumed* xmits is: Sum of slots / (Good + Bad) = 43. So the delay of 1 jiffy helped the host clean up, on average, just 43 entries, which is 16% of total entries. This is intended to show that the guest is not sitting idle waiting for the jiffy to expire. > > > I can post it, mind testing this? > > > > Sure. > > Just posted. Would appreciate feedback. Do I need to apply all the patches and simply test? Thanks, - KK -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html