Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v5 net-next 4/6] virtio-net: add basic interrupt coalescing support

From: Pawel Moll <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 12:41:06 +0000

On Fri, 2015-02-13 at 02:52 +0000, Rusty Russell wrote:
> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <[email-masked]> writes:
> > On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 12:02:37PM +1030, Rusty Russell wrote:
> >> Jason Wang <[email-masked]> writes:
> >> > This patch enables the interrupt coalescing setting through ethtool.
> >> 
> >> The problem is that there's nothing network specific about interrupt
> >> coalescing.  I can see other devices wanting exactly the same thing,
> >> which means we'd deprecate this in the next virtio standard.
> >> 
> >> I think the right answer is to extend like we did with
> >> vring_used_event(), eg:
> >> 
> >> 1) Add a new feature VIRTIO_F_RING_COALESCE.
> >> 2) Add another a 32-bit field after vring_used_event(), eg:
> >>         #define vring_used_delay(vr) (*(u32 *)((vr)->avail->ring[(vr)->num + 2]))
> >> 
> >> This loses the ability to coalesce by number of frames, but we can still
> >> do number of sg entries, as we do now with used_event, and we could
> >> change virtqueue_enable_cb_delayed() to take a precise number if we
> >> wanted.
> >
> > But do we expect delay to be update dynamically?
> > If not, why not stick it in config space?
> 
> Hmm, we could update it dynamically (and will, in the case of ethtool).
> But it won't be common, so we could append a field to
> virtio_pci_common_cfg for PCI.
> 
> I think MMIO and CCW would be easy to extend too, but CC'd to check.

As far as I understand the virtio_pci_common_cfg principle (just had a
look, for the first time ;-), it's now an equivalent of the MMIO control
registers block. I see no major problem with adding another one.

Or were you thinking about introducing some standard for the "real"
config space? (fine with me as well - the transport will have nothing to
do :-)

Paweł