This patchset use the bulk ALLOC side of the kmem_cache bulk APIs, for SKB allocations. The bulk free side got enabled in merge commit 3134b9f019f2 ("net: mitigating kmem_cache free slowpath").
The first two patches is a followup on the free-side, which enables bulk-free in the drivers mlx4 and mlx5 (dev_kfree_skb -> napi_consume_skb). Rest of patchset is focused on bulk alloc-side. We start with a conservative bulk alloc of 8 SKB, which all drivers using the napi_alloc_skb() call will benefit from. Then the API is extended to, allow driver hinting on needed SKBs (only some drivers know this size), and mlx5 driver is the first user of hinting. Small hint for people wanting to tune their systems. Default number of SKB objects per slab-page is 32 objects. This limits the bulking sizes for the SLUB allocator. SLUB can be tuned via kernel cmdline boot option slub_min_objects=128. Increasing this gives a significant performance boost, but at the cost of more memory "waste" inside kmem_cache/slab allocator. Patchset based on net-next at commit 3ebeac1d0295 --- Jesper Dangaard Brouer (7): mlx5: use napi_consume_skb API to get bulk free operations mlx4: use napi_consume_skb API to get bulk free operations net: bulk alloc and reuse of SKBs in NAPI context mlx5: use napi_alloc_skb API to get SKB bulk allocations mlx4: use napi_alloc_skb API to get SKB bulk allocations net: introduce napi_alloc_skb_hint() for more use-cases mlx5: hint the NAPI alloc skb API about the expected bulk size drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx4/en_rx.c | 7 +- drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx4/en_tx.c | 19 ++++- drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx5/core/en.h | 5 + drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx5/core/en_rx.c | 11 ++- drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx5/core/en_tx.c | 4 + drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx5/core/en_txrx.c | 4 + include/linux/skbuff.h | 19 ++++- net/core/skbuff.c | 75 +++++++++++++-------- 8 files changed, 92 insertions(+), 52 deletions(-) --