Re: [patch] voluntary-preempt-2.6.9-rc1-bk4-Q5

[Ingo Molnar]

* Mark_H_Johnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx <Mark_H_Johnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> LONG NETWORK LATENCIES
> ======================
> 
> In about 25 minutes of heavy testing, I had two latency traces with
> /proc/sys/kernel/preempt_max_latency set to 700. They had the same start /
> end location with the long delay as follows:
>   730 us, entries: 361
>   ...
>   started at rtl8139_poll+0x3c/0x160
>   ended at   rtl8139_poll+0x100/0x160

regarding this particular latency, could you try the attached patch
ontop of -Q5? It turns the ->poll() loop into separate, individually
preemptable iterations instead of one batch of processing. In theory
this should result in latency being lower regardless of the
netdev_max_backlog value.

	Ingo
--- linux/net/core/dev.c.orig2	
+++ linux/net/core/dev.c	
@@ -1903,7 +1903,7 @@ static void net_rx_action(struct softirq
 {
 	struct softnet_data *queue = &__get_cpu_var(softnet_data);
 	unsigned long start_time = jiffies;
-	int budget = netdev_max_backlog;
+	int budget = netdev_max_backlog, loops;
 
 	
 	local_irq_disable();
@@ -1926,7 +1926,10 @@ static void net_rx_action(struct softirq
 		dev = list_entry(queue->poll_list.next,
 				 struct net_device, poll_list);
 
-		if (dev->quota <= 0 || dev->poll(dev, &budget)) {
+		loops = 1;
+		if (dev->quota <= 0 || dev->poll(dev, &loops)) {
+			if (loops < 1)
+				budget--;
 			local_irq_disable();
 			list_del(&dev->poll_list);
 			list_add_tail(&dev->poll_list, &queue->poll_list);