On 2016-08-26 17:19, Dave Taht wrote:
On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Johannes Berg
<johan...@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
On Fri, 2016-08-26 at 03:48 -0700, Dave Taht wrote:
I'm always rather big on people testing latency under load, and napi
tends to add some.
That's a completely useless comment.
Obviously, everybody uses NAPI; it's necessary for system load and
thus
performance, and lets drivers take advantage of TCP merging to reduce
ACKs, which is tremendously helpful (over wifi in particular.)
Please stop making such drive-by comments that focus only on the
single
thing you find important above all; not all people can care only about
that single thing, and unconstructively reiterating it over and over
doesn't help.
Well, I apologize for being testy. It is I spent a lot of time
testing michal's patchset for the ath10k back in may, and I *will* go
and retest ath10k, when these patches land. My principal concern with
using napi is at lower rates than the maxes typically reported in a
patchset.
You are always welcome to validate this change and share your feedback.
But it would be nice if people always did test for latency under load
when making improvements, before getting to me, and despite having
helped make a very comprehensive test suite available (flent) that
tests all sorts of things for wifi, getting people to actually use it
to see real problems, (in addition to latency under load!) while their
fingers are still hot in the codebase, and track/plot their results,
remains an ongoing issue across the entire industry.
http://blog.cerowrt.org/post/fq_codel_on_ath10k/
As you know, NAPI is designed to improve performance of high speed n/w
devices. From LWN: "NAPI is a proven
(www.cyberus.ca/~hadi/usenix-paper.tgz) technique to improve network
performance on Linux." Even most of Gig-speed network drivers were
already migrated to NAPI. Tasklets are heavy CPU consumers and it will
impact performance of other low priority tasks. The article[1] explains
the problems of tasklet.
From my observations, average CPU usage got reduced by 10% under heavy
data traffic against same peak throughput. I validated this change on
both IPQ4019 platform (Quad-Core ARM Cortex A7 processor) and AP135
platform (uni-core MIPS 720 MHz processor). I did not observe any
regression.
There are many other problems in wifi, of course, that could use
engineering mental internalization, like airtime fairness, and the
mis-behavior of the hardware queues,
http://blog.cerowrt.org/post/cs5_lockout/
wifi channel scans
http://blog.cerowrt.org/post/disabling_channel_scans/
and so on.
I have a ton more datasets and blog entries left to write up from the
ath9k work thus far which point to some other issues (minstrel,
aggregation, retries)
your data are really impressive. Once again, feel free to validate this
change and share your inputs.
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/239633/
-Rajkumar
