Subject: Re: Luca Deri's paper: Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling

From: Luca Deri <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 09:11:27 +0200

Jason,
Jason Lunz wrote:

>[This message has also been posted to gmane.linux.network.]
>[email-masked] said:
>  
>
>>In addition if you do care about performance, I believe you're willing
>>to turn off packet transmission and only do packet receive. 
>>    
>>
>
>I don't understand what you mean by this. packet-mmap works perfectly
>well on an UP|PROMISC interface with no addresses bound to it. As long
>as no packets are injected through a packet socket, the tx path never
>gets involved.
>
>  
>
my PF_RING does not allow you to send data, but just to receive it. I 
have not implemented transmission as this work is mainly for receiving 
data and not for sending (although it should be fairly easy to do add 
this feature). So 1) everything is optimized for receiving packets and 
2) as I have explained before the trip of a packet from the NIC to the 
userland is much shorter that with pcap-mmap (for instance you don't 
cross netfilter at all).

>>IRQ: Linux has far too much latency, in particular at high speeds. I'm
>>not the right person who can say "this is the way to go", however I
>>believe that we need some sort of interrupt prioritization like RTIRQ
>>does.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't think this is the problem, since small-packet performance is bad
>even with a fully-polling e1000 in NAPI mode. As Robert Olsson has
>demonstrated, a highly-loaded napi e1000 only generates a few hundred
>interrupts per second. So the vast majority of packets recieved are
>coming in without a hardware interrupt occurring at all.
>
>Could it be that each time an hw irq _is_ generated, it causes many
>packets to be lost? That's a possibility. Can you explain in more detail
>how you measured the effect of interrupt latency on recieve efficiency?
>  
>
I'm not an expert here. All i can tell you is that measuring performance 
with rtdisc I have realized that even at high load, even if there are 
few incoming interrupts (as Robert demonstrated) the kernel latency is 
not acceptable. That's why I used RTIRQ.

>  
>
>>Finally It would be nice to have in the standard Linux core some
>>packet capture improvements. It could either be based on my work or on
>>somebody else's work. It doesn't really matter as long as Linux gets
>>faster.
>>    
>>
>
>I agree. I think a good place to start would be reading and
>understanding this thread:
>
>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/193758
>
>There's some disagreement for a while about where all this softirq load
>is coming from. It looks like an interaction of softirqs and RCU, but
>the first patch doesn't help.  Finally Olsson pointed out:
>
>http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/194412
>
>that the majority of softirq's are being run from hardirq exit. Even
>with NAPI. At this point, I think, it's clear that the problem exists
>regardless of rcu, and indeed, Linux is bad at doing packet-mmap RX of a
>small-packet gigabit flood on both 2.4 and 2.6 (my old 2.4 measurements
>earlier in this thread show this).
>
>I'm particularly interested in trying Andrea's suggestion from
>http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/194486 , but I won't have
>the time anytime soon.
>
>Jason
>  
>
I'll read them.

Thanks, Luca

-- 
Luca Deri <[email-masked]>	http://luca.ntop.org/
Hacker: someone who loves to program and enjoys being
clever about it - Richard Stallman