Subject: Re: [PATCH bpf-next v3 1/3] xsk: Support UMEM chunk_size > PAGE_SIZE

From: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:08:44 +0200

Kal Cutter Conley <[email-masked]> writes:

>>
>> Well, I'm mostly concerned with having two different operation and
>> configuration modes for the same thing. We'll probably need to support
>> multibuf for AF_XDP anyway for the non-ZC path, which means we'll need
>> to create a UAPI for that in any case. And having two APIs is just going
>> to be more complexity to handle at both the documentation and
>> maintenance level.
>
> I don't know if I would call this another "API". This patchset doesn't
> change the semantics of anything. It only lifts the chunk size
> restriction when hugepages are used. Furthermore, the changes here are
> quite small and easy to understand. The four sentences added to the
> documentation shouldn't be too concerning either. :-)

Well, you mentioned yourself that:

> The disadvantage of this patchset is requiring the user to allocate
> HugeTLB pages which is an extra complication.

In addition, presumably when using this mode, the other XDP actions
(XDP_PASS, XDP_REDIRECT to other targets) would stop working unless we
add special handling for that in the kernel? We'll definitely need to
handle that somehow...

> In 30 years when everyone finally migrates to page sizes >= 64K the
> maintenance burden will drop to zero. Knock wood. :-)

Haha, right, but let's make sure we have something that is consistent in
the intervening decades, shall we? ;)

>> It *might* be worth it to do this if the performance benefit is really
>> compelling, but, well, you'd need to implement both and compare directly
>> to know that for sure :)
>
> What about use-cases that require incoming packet data to be
> contiguous? Without larger chunk sizes, the user is forced to allocate
> extra space per packet and copy the data. This defeats the purpose of
> ZC.

What use cases would that be, exactly? Presumably this is also a
performance issue? Which goes back to me asking for benchmarks :)

-Toke