The af_packet pmd driver binds to a raw socket and allows sending and
receiving of packets through the kernel.
Since commit [1], the kernel strips the vlan tags early in
__netif_receive_skb_core(), so we receive untagged packets while running
with the af_packet pmd.
Luckily for us, the skb vlan-related fields are still populated from the
stripped vlan tags, so we end up having all the information that we need
in the mbuf.
Having the pmd driver support DEV_RX_OFFLOAD_VLAN_STRIP allows the
application to control the desired vlan stripping behavior, until we
have a way to describe offloads that can't be disabled by pmd drivers.
This patch will cause a change in the default way that the af_packet pmd
treats received vlan-tagged frames. While previously, the application
was required to check the PKT_RX_VLAN_STRIPPED flag, after this patch,
the pmd will re-insert the vlan tag transparently to the user, unless
the DEV_RX_OFFLOAD_VLAN_STRIP is enabled in rxmode.offloads.
I've attempted a preliminary benchmark to understand if the change could
cause a sizable performance hit.
Setup:
Two virtual machines running on top of an ESXi hypervisor
Tx: DPDK app (running on top of vmxnet3 PMD)
Rx: af_packet (running on top of a kernel vmxnet3 interface)
Packet size :68 (packet contains a vlan tag)
Rates:
Tx - 1.419 Mpps
Rx (without vlan insertion) - 1227636 pps
Rx (with vlan insertion) - 1220081 pps
At a first glance, we don't seem to have a large degradation in terms of
packet rate.
[1]
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/bcc6d47903612c3861201cc3a866fb60
Signed-off-by: Tudor Cornea <tudor.cornea@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Acked-by: Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit@intel.com>
d41d39bcf7