ARM network performance and dma_mask (was: [BUG,REGRESSION?] 3.11.6+,3.12: GbE iface rate drops to few KB/s)

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Dear Willy Tarreau,

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:38:34 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:

> While we were diagnosing a network performance regression that we finally
> found and fixed, it appeared during a test that Linus' tree shows a much
> higher performance on Armada 370 (armv7) than its predecessors. I can
> saturate the two Gig links of my Mirabox each with a single TCP flow and
> keep up to 25% of idle CPU in the optimal case. In 3.12.1 or 3.10.20, I
> can achieve around 1.3 Gbps when the two ports are used in parallel.

Interesting finding and analysis, once again!

> I'm not at ease with these things so I'd like to ask your opinion here, is
> this supposed to be an improvement or a fix ? Is this something we should
> backport into stable versions, or is there something to fix in the armada
> platform so that it works just as if the patch was applied ?

I guess the driver should have been setting its dma_mask to 0xffffffff,
since the platform is capable of doing DMA on the first 32 bits of the
physical address space, probably something like calling
pci_set_dma_mask(pdev, DMA_BIT_MASK(32)) or something like that. I know
Russell has recently added some helpers to prevent stupid people (like
me) from doing mistakes when setting the DMA masks. Certainly worth
having a look.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com