Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 07:05:17 -0500 From: Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net> To: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> Cc: freebsd-net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Jack Vogel <jfvogel@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Proposed 6.2 em RELEASE patch Message-ID: <200611111205.kABC59gP032197@lava.sentex.ca> In-Reply-To: <455570D8.6070000@samsco.org> References: <2a41acea0611081719h31be096eu614d2f2325aff511@mail.gmail.com> <200611091536.kA9FaltD018819@lava.sentex.ca> <45534E76.6020906@samsco.org> <200611092200.kA9M0q1E020473@lava.sentex.ca> <200611102004.kAAK4iO9027778@lava.sentex.ca> <2a41acea0611101400w5b8cef40ob84ed6de181f3e2c@mail.gmail.com> <200611102221.kAAML6ol028630@lava.sentex.ca> <455570D8.6070000@samsco.org>
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At 01:42 AM 11/11/2006, Scott Long wrote:
>surprised by your results. I'm still a bit unclear on the exact
>topology of your setup, so if could explain it some more in private
>email, I'd appreciate it.
Hi,
I made a quick diagram of the test setup that should make it
more clear
http://www.tancsa.com/blast.jpg
Basically 5 boxes (plus my workstation for out of band access), the
main one being tested is the box marked R2 which has a 2 port PCIe em
NIC (Pro 1000PT) in the motherboard's 4X slot. I have 2 test boxes
as UDP senders and 2 test boxes as UDP receivers, and all the packets
flow through the 2 interfaces of R2. With one stream of packets
being blasted across, the box is dropping some packets even on its
OOB management interface. With 2, its totally unresponsive. Only
with polling am I able to continue to work on the box via the OOB
interface while one and even 2 streams of UDP packets are blasting
across. However, in polling mode some amount of packets are being
dropped and I guess I need to better understand how many. My goal in
all this is to have a firewall / router that can withstand a high pps
workload that will still be reachable OOB when under attack or even
under high workload.
To measure how many packets are dropped I was looking at making a
modified netreceive to count the packets it gets so I can test to see
if polling mode will be adequate for my needs.
Lets say the max pps the box can handle is X, either in polling or
non polling modes. As the box approaches X and gets pushed beyond X,
I guess the ideal situation for my needs would be that it drops some
packets on the busiest interface so that it can still function and
service its other needs, be that network, disk, whatever. But my
question is, is X the same for polling and non polling modes.
>For the short term, I don't think that there is anything that can be
>magically tweaked that will safely give better results. I know that
>Gleb has some ideas on a fairly simple change for the non-INTR_FAST,
>non-POLLING case, but I and several others worry that it's not robust
>in the face of real-world network problems.
>
>For the long term, I have a number of ideas for improving both the RX
>and TX paths in the driver. Some of it is specific to the if_em driver,
>some involve improvements in the FFWD and PFIL_HOOKS code as well as the
>driver. What will help me is if you can hook up a serial console to
>your machine and see if it can be made to drop to the debugger while it
>is under load and otherwise unresponsive. If you can, getting a process
>dump might help confirm where each CPU is spending its time.
Yes, I will see what I can do over the weekend. I have some changes
to babysit again tomorrow night and will see what I can do between cycles.
---Mike
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