underlying unaligned bcopy) on incoming packets that are already
available (albeit unaligned) in a buffer.
The performance improvement varies, depending on CPU and memory
speed, but can be quite large especially on slow CPUs. I have seen
over 50% increase on forwarding speed on the sis driver for the
486/133 (embedded systems), which does exactly the same thing.
The behaviour is controlled by a sysctl variable, hw.dc_quick which
defaults to 1. Set it to 0 to restore the old behaviour.
After running a few experiments (in userland, though) I am convinced
that doing the m_devget() is detrimental to performance in almost
all cases.
Even if your CPU has degraded performance with misaligned data,
the bcopy() in the driver has the same overhead due to misaligment
as the one that you save in the uiomove(), plus you do one extra
copy and pollute the cache.
But more often than not, you do not even have to touch the payload,
e.g. when you are forwarding packets, and even in the often-cited
case of NFS, you often end up passing a pointer to the payload to
the disk controller.
In any case, you can play with the sysctl variable to toggle between
the two behaviours, and see if it makes a difference.
MFC-after: 3 days
21d95a8778