Most relevant features:
- netmap emulation on any NIC, even those without native netmap support.
On the ixgbe we have measured about 4Mpps/core/queue in this mode,
which is still a lot more than with sockets/bpf.
- seamless interconnection of VALE switch, NICs and host stack.
If you disable accelerations on your NIC (say em0)
ifconfig em0 -txcsum -txcsum
you can use the VALE switch to connect the NIC and the host stack:
vale-ctl -h valeXX:em0
allowing sharing the NIC with other netmap clients.
- THE USER API HAS SLIGHTLY CHANGED (head/cur/tail pointers
instead of pointers/count as before). This was unavoidable to support,
in the future, multiple threads operating on the same rings.
Netmap clients require very small source code changes to compile again.
On the plus side, the new API should be easier to understand
and the internals are a lot simpler.
The manual page has been updated extensively to reflect the current
features and give some examples.
This is the result of work of several people including Giuseppe Lettieri,
Vincenzo Maffione, Michio Honda and myself, and has been financially
supported by EU projects CHANGE and OPENLAB, from NetApp University
Research Fund, NEC, and of course the Universita` di Pisa.
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
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.
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.
