[PATCH 0/21]: powerpc/cell spidernet bugfixes, etc.

From: Linas Vepstas
Date: Tue Oct 10 2006 - 16:50:11 EST



Andrew, please apply/forward upstream.

The following set of 21 patches (!) are all aimed at the the
spidernet ethernet device driver. The spidernet is an etherenet
controller built into the Toshiba southbridge for the PowerPC Cell
processor. (This is the only device in existance that with this
ethernet hardware in it).

These patches re-package/re-order/re-cleanup a previous
set of patches I've previously mailed. Thus, some have
been previously Acked-by lines, most do not. Most of
these patches are tiny, and handle problems that cropped
up during testing. Sorry about there being so many of them.

The first set of 12 patches fix a large variety of mostly
minor bugs.

The important patches are 13 through 17: these overcome a
debilitating performance problem on transmit (6 megabits
per second !!) on transmit of patches 500 bytes or larger.
After applying these, I am able to get the following:

pkt sz speed (100K buffs) speed (4M buffs)
------ ----------------- ----------------
1500 700 Mbits/sec 951 Mbits/sec
1000 658 Mbits/sec 770
800 600 648
500 500 500
300 372 372
60 70 70

Above buf size refers to /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_default

----

I'm not planning on any further patches for a long while.
I tried to do som RX work, but gave up. RX performance could
be improved.

FYI, Christoph Hellwig's node-aware patches seem to make no
difference at all any more.

I tried to base these on linux-2.6.19-rc1-mm1 but hit a
kernel BUG in copy_fdtable at fs/file.c:138!
(reported earlire today by Olof)

--linas
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