Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC net-next 00/11] udp gso

From: Paolo Abeni <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 13:17:54 +0200

On Tue, 2018-04-17 at 16:00 -0400, Willem de Bruijn wrote:
> From: Willem de Bruijn <[email-masked]>
> 
> Segmentation offload reduces cycles/byte for large packets by
> amortizing the cost of protocol stack traversal.
> 
> This patchset implements GSO for UDP. A process can concatenate and
> submit multiple datagrams to the same destination in one send call
> by setting socket option SOL_UDP/UDP_SEGMENT with the segment size,
> or passing an analogous cmsg at send time.
> 
> The stack will send the entire large (up to network layer max size)
> datagram through the protocol layer. At the GSO layer, it is broken
> up in individual segments. All receive the same network layer header
> and UDP src and dst port. All but the last segment have the same UDP
> header, but the last may differ in length and checksum.

This is interesting, thanks for sharing!

I have some local patches somewhere implementing UDP GRO, but I never
tried to upstream them, since I lacked the associated GSO and I thought
that the use-case was not too relevant.

Given that your use-case is a connected socket - no per packet route
lookup - how does GSO performs compared to plain sendmmsg()? Have you
considered using and/or improving the latter?

When testing with Spectre/Meltdown mitigation in places, I expect that
the most relevant part of the gain is due to the single syscall per
burst.

Cheers,

Paolo