David, arch-specific code in the driver concerns me. I would really
like to avoid any arch-specific code in the driver if at all possible.
Can we find a way to move this work to the arch-dependent areas? This
doesn't seem to be an issue unique to e1000, so moving this up one level
should benefit other devices as well. More questions below.
> Peculiarities in the PCI bridges on Power4 based ppc64 machines mean
> that unaligned DMAs are horribly slow. This hits us hard on gigabit
> transfers, since the packets (starting from the MAC header) are
> usually only 2-byte aligned.
2-byte alignment is bad for ppc64, so what is minimum alignment that is
good? (I hope it's not 2K!) What could you do at a higher level to
present properly aligned buffers to the driver?
> The patch below addresses this by copying and realigning packets into
> nicely 2k aligned buffers. As well as fixing the alignment that
> minimises the number of TCE lookups, and because we allocate the
> buffers pci_alloc_consistent(), we avoid setting up and tearing down
> the TCE mappings for each packet.
If I'm understanding the patch correctly, you're saying unaligned DMA +
TCE lookup is more expensive than a data copy? If we copy the data, we
loss some of the benefits of TSO and Zerocopy and h/w checksum
offloading! What is more expensive, unaligned DMA or TCE?
-scott
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jun 15 2003 - 22:00:35 EST