This includes the following:
- use separate memory regions for VALE ports
- locking fixes
- some simplifications in the NIC-specific routines
- performance improvements for the VALE switch
- some new features in the pkt-gen test program
- documentation updates
There are small API changes that require programs to be recompiled
(NETMAP_API has been bumped so you will detect old binaries at runtime).
In particular:
- struct netmap_slot now is 16 bytes to support an extra pointer,
which may save one data copy when using VALE ports or VMs;
- the struct netmap_if has two extra fields;
MFC after: 3 days
- the VALE switch now support up to 254 destinations per switch,
unicast or broadcast (multicast goes to all ports).
- we can attach hw interfaces and the host stack to a VALE switch,
which means we will be able to use it more or less as a native bridge
(minor tweaks still necessary).
A 'vale-ctl' program is supplied in tools/tools/netmap
to attach/detach ports the switch, and list current configuration.
- the lookup function in the VALE switch can be reassigned to
something else, similar to the pf hooks. This will enable
attaching the firewall, or other processing functions (e.g. in-kernel
openvswitch) directly on the netmap port.
The internal API used by device drivers does not change.
Userspace applications should be recompiled because we
bump NETMAP_API as we now use some fields in the struct nmreq
that were previously ignored -- otherwise, data structures
are the same.
Manpages will be committed separately.
USERSPACE:
1. add support for devices with different number of rx and tx queues;
2. add better support for zero-copy operation, adding an extra field
to the netmap ring to indicate how many buffers we have already processed
but not yet released (with help from Eddie Kohler);
3. The two changes above unfortunately require an API change, so while
at it add a version field and some spares to the ioctl() argument
to help detect mismatches.
4. update the manual page for the two changes above;
5. update sample applications in tools/tools/netmap
KERNEL:
1. simplify the internal structures moving the global wait queues
to the 'struct netmap_adapter';
2. simplify the functions that map kring<->nic ring indexes
3. normalize device-specific code, helps mainteinance;
4. start exploring the impact of micro-optimizations (prefetch etc.)
in the ixgbe driver.
Use 'legacy' descriptors on the tx ring and prefetch slots gives
about 20% speedup at 900 MHz. Another 7-10% would come from removing
the explict calls to bus_dmamap* in the core (they are effectively
NOPs in this case, but it takes expensive load of the per-buffer
dma maps to figure out that they are all NULL.
Rx performance not investigated.
I am postponing the MFC so i can import a few more improvements
before merging.
TUNABLE variable (hw.netmap.buf_size) so we can experiment
with values different from 2048 which may give better cache performance.
- rearrange the memory allocation code so it will be easier
to replace it with a different implementation. The current code
relies on a single large contiguous chunk of memory obtained through
contigmalloc.
The new implementation (not committed yet) uses multiple
smaller chunks which are easier to fit in a fragmented address
space.
A link reset now is completely transparent for the netmap client:
even if the NIC resets its own ring (e.g. restarting from 0),
the client will not see any change in the current rx/tx positions,
because the driver will keep track of the offset between the two.
2. make the device-specific code more uniform across different drivers
There were some inconsistencies in the implementation of the netmap
support routines, now drivers have been aligned to a common
code structure.
3. import netmap support for ixgbe . This is implemented as a very
small patch for ixgbe.c (233 lines, 11 chunks, mostly comments:
in total the patch has only 54 lines of new code) , as most of
the code is in an external file sys/dev/netmap/ixgbe_netmap.h ,
following some initial comments from Jack Vogel about making
changes less intrusive.
(Note, i have emailed Jack multiple times asking if he had
comments on this structure of the code; i got no reply so
i assume he is fine with it).
Support for other drivers (em, lem, re, igb) will come later.
"ixgbe" is now the reference driver for netmap support. Both the
external file (sys/dev/netmap/ixgbe_netmap.h) and the device-specific
patches (in sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe.c) are heavily commented and should
serve as a reference for other device drivers.
Tested on i386 and amd64 with the pkt-gen program in tools/tools/netmap,
the sender does 14.88 Mpps at 1050 Mhz and 14.2 Mpps at 900 MHz
on an i7-860 with 4 cores and 82599 card. Haven't tried yet more
aggressive optimizations such as adding 'prefetch' instructions
in the time-critical parts of the code.
I/O from userspace, capable of line rate at 10G, see
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/
At this time I am bringing in only the generic code (sys/dev/netmap/
plus two headers under sys/net/), and some sample applications in
tools/tools/netmap. There is also a manpage in share/man/man4 [1]
In order to make use of the framework you need to build a kernel
with "device netmap", and patch individual drivers with the code
that you can find in
sys/dev/netmap/head.diff
The file will go away as the relevant pieces are committed to
the various device drivers, which should happen in a few days
after talking to the driver maintainers.
Netmap support is available at the moment for Intel 10G and 1G
cards (ixgbe, em/lem/igb), and for the Realtek 1G card ("re").
I have partial patches for "bge" and am starting to work on "cxgbe".
Hopefully changes are trivial enough so interested third parties
can submit their patches. Interested people can contact me
for advice on how to add netmap support to specific devices.
CREDITS:
Netmap has been developed by Luigi Rizzo and other collaborators
at the Universita` di Pisa, and supported by EU project CHANGE
(http://www.change-project.eu/)
The code is distributed under a BSD Copyright.
[1] In my opinion is a bad idea to have all manpage in one directory.
We should place kernel documentation in the same dir that contains
the code, which would make it much simpler to keep doc and code
in sync, reduce the clutter in share/man/ and incidentally is
the policy used for all of userspace code.
Makefiles and doc tools can be trivially adjusted to find the
manpages in the relevant subdirs.
