Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:53:10 -0700 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> To: PseudoCylon <moonlightakkiy@yahoo.ca> Cc: FreeBSD Net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>, freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: request for help: 'fixing' the 802.11 TX path Message-ID: <CAJ-Vmok5vJNYUbsUuk_Ps=7oLvpJutuyDZ7279bft1qYiYmeTA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CAFZ_MYL3v%2BhAea5RaBL4i9o_JjN6_u66znmXXcPsh11L7hHYEg@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAFZ_MYL3v%2BhAea5RaBL4i9o_JjN6_u66znmXXcPsh11L7hHYEg@mail.gmail.com>
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On 28 October 2012 20:43, PseudoCylon <moonlightakkiy@yahoo.ca> wrote: > Cannot we just add custom hand off function to ieee80211_start()? Yes. That's the general idea. But what I don't want to do is have it just wake up the driver TX taskqueue - well, unless we have to. That means we'll have two context switches for each frame being transmitted and that as a concept just sucks. See my (very recent) email to -wireless - I broke TCP throughput quite substantially by moving ath(4) TX into the taskqueue. I thought the problem was _just_ going to be how overlapping, direct dispatch TX could be preempted by the RX tasklet and TX completion, but there's obviously more going on. I'm going to experiment some more with it before I go down this path. I don't want to do the linux thing of "just grab a txrx spinlock in mac80211 before calling the driver", serialising everything that way. That feels plain ugly. But then, a lot of our network drivers do much the same thing - they grab big, long-held locks and they either implement their own lockless queue in front of that lock (eg, what the intel/chelsio code does) or they just ignore it entirely and leave it up to the scheduler to wake up threads once the contending lock is unlocked. I have all kinds of concerns about the behaviour of if_bridge and other if_transmit() enabled friends when sending to one of these badly locked drivers, however that's going to have to wait. Well, maybe I'll poke the network people at meetbsd this weekend and see what they think. Adrian
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