Hello Jesse and others,

I have a Dell R610 with 82575GB nics and would like to enable DCA (i 
assume this is beneficial as this server will handle a huge amount of 
small packets). I/OAT is enabled the BIOS, but:

ioatdma 0000:00:16.0: DCA is disabled in BIOS

Can DCA still be enabled? If so, which patch should i use?

Btw: on Dell servers it is possible to disable prefetchers.

Driver details:
driver: igb
version: 1.3.16-k2
firmware-version: 1.7-7
bus-info: 0000:06:00.0

Thanks.

Patrick Schreurs

Brandeburg, Jesse wrote:
> You should see a decrease in CPU with DCA on.
> 
> If you run the ethregs utility from sourceforge and grep DCA you'll see that 
> the lower 16 bits are configured differently for each cpu assigned an 
> interrupt, when DCA is enabled.
> 
> Are you running with MSI-X enabled?
> 
> There is another patch we can add which enables DCA for data of received 
> packets, but you need to run a test which actually accesses the data (usually 
> not benchmarks)
> 
> Let me know if you're interested in applying this patch.
> 
> Jesse
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sangjin Han [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 12:21 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [E1000-devel] How can I make sure that ixgbe is working with DCA?
> 
> I'm running an Intel 82598EB 10G AF DA on a Dell PowerEdge 1950 (Xeon
> 5430 + 5000X chipset). To enable DCA on my machine, I enabled I/OAT in
> BIOS and applied the patch(http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/15273/)
> to the I/OAT driver. I confirmed that ixgbe_setup_dca() (in ixgbe
> 2.0.34.3) is done successfully.
> 
> But I'm not sure whether DCA is working or not, because there is no
> change in throughput and CPU utilization. Is there any way to check if
> DCA works well with ixgbe? like some statistics or something.
> 
> this is the result of ls /sys/class/dca
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 20 03:12 dca0 ->
> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.0/dca/dca0
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 20 04:17 requester55 ->
> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.0/dca/dca0/requester55
> 
> How much performance gain can I expect with DCA? Is it insiginificant
> so that I can't see any change?
> 
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