Subject: Re: pktgen question

From: Rick Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:02:36 -0700

>> Perf-wise, you could clone the skbs up front, then deliver them to the 
>> nic in a tight loop.  This would mitigate the added overhead 
>> introduced by calling skb_clone() in the loop doing transmits...
> 
> That only works if you are sending a small number of skbs.  You can't 
> pre-clone several minutes worth of 10Gbe traffic
> with any normal amount of RAM.

Does pktgen really need to allocate anything more than some smallish fraction 
more than the depth of the driver's transmit queue?

Of course, even that won't fit in the L1 cache of a processor, so if one is 
really just trying to max-out the NIC it might still have too much overhead, but 
then does pktgen+driver et al actually fit in an L1 cache?

rick jones