For the "fsl,etsec2" compatible models the driver currently
supports 8 Tx and Rx DMA rings (aka HW queues). However, there
are only 2 pairs of Rx/Tx interrupt lines, as these controllers
are integrated in low power SoCs with 2 CPUs at most. As a result,
there are at most 2 NAPI instances that have to service multiple
Tx and Rx queues for these devices. This complicates the NAPI
polling routine having to iterate over the mutiple Rx/Tx queues
hooked to the same interrupt lines. And there's also an overhead
at HW level, as the controller needs to service all the 8 Tx rings
in a round robin manner. The combined overhead shows up for multi
parallel Tx flows transmitted by the kernel stack, when the driver
usually starts returning NETDEV_TX_BUSY leading to NETDEV WATCHDOG
Tx timeout triggering if the Tx path is congested for too long.
As an alternative, this patch makes the driver support only one
Tx/Rx DMA ring per NAPI instance (per interrupt group or pair
of Tx/Rx interrupt lines) by default. The simplified single queue
polling routine (gfar_poll_sq) will be the default napi poll routine
for the etsec2 devices too. Some adjustments needed to be made to
link the Tx/Rx HW queues with each NAPI instance (2 in this case).
The gfar_poll_sq() is already successfully used by older SQ_SG_MODE
(single interrupt group) controllers.
This patch fixes Tx timeout triggering under heavy Tx traffic load
(i.e. iperf -c -P 8) for the "fsl,etsec2" (currently the only
MQ_MG_MODE devices). There's also a significant memory footprint
reduction by supporting 2 Rx/Tx DMA rings (at most), instead of 8,
for these devices.
Signed-off-by: Claudiu Manoil <claudiu.manoil@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>