[dpdk-dev] mbuf changes

[Thomas Monjalon]

2016-10-25 15:00, Olivier Matz:
> On 10/25/2016 12:22 PM, Morten Brørup wrote:
> > From: Ananyev, Konstantin
> >> From: Bruce Richardson
> >>> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 11:47:16PM +0200, Morten Brørup wrote:
> >>>> From: Bruce Richardson
> >>>>> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 04:11:33PM +0000, Wiles, Keith wrote:
> >>>>>> I thought we also talked about removing the m->port from the
> >>>>>> mbuf as it is not really needed.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> Yes, this was mentioned, and also the option of moving the port
> >>>>> value to the second cacheline, but it appears that NXP are using
> >>>>> the port value in their NIC drivers for passing in metadata, so
> >>>>> we'd need their agreement on any move (or removal).
> >>>>>
> >>>> If a single driver instance services multiple ports, so the ports
> >>>> are not polled individually, the m->port member will be required to
> >>>> identify the port.
> >>>> In that case, it might also used elsewhere in the ingress path,
> >>>> and thus appropriate having in the first cache line.
> >>
> >> Ok, but these days most of devices have multiple rx queues.
> >> So identify the RX source properly you need not only port, but
> >> port+queue (at least 3 bytes).
> >> But I suppose better to wait for NXP input here.
> >>
> >>> So yes, this needs further discussion with NXP.
> > 
> > It seems that this concept might be somewhat similar to the
> > Flow Director information, which already has plenty of bits
> > in the first cache line. You should consider if this can be
> > somehow folded into the m->hash union.
> 
> I'll tend to agree with Morten.
> 
> First, I think that having more than 255 virtual links is possible,
> so increasing the port size to 16 bits is not a bad idea.
> 
> I think the port information is more useful for a network stack
> than the queue_id, but it may not be the case for all applications.
> On the other hand, the queue_id (or something else providing the same
> level of information) could led in the flow director structure.
> 
> Now, the question is: do we really need the port to be inside the mbuf?
> Indeed, the application can already associate a bulk of packet with a
> port id.
> 
> The reason why I'll prefer to keep it is because I'm pretty sure that
> some applications use it. At least in the examples/ directory, we can
> find distributor, dpdk_qat, ipv4_multicast, load_balancer,
> packet_ordering. I did not check these apps in detail, but it makes me
> feel that other external applications could make use of the port field.

Having some applications using it does not mean that there is a good
justification to keep it.
I think the data must be stored inside the mbuf struct only if it
increases the performance of known use cases significantly.
So the questions should be:
- How significant are the use cases?
- What is the performance drop when having the data outside of the struct?

The mbuf space must be kept jealously like a DPDK treasure :)