[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] mbuf: make rearm_data address naturally aligned

[Bruce Richardson]

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 07:27:43PM +0530, Jerin Jacob wrote:
> To avoid multiple stores on fast path, Ethernet drivers
> aggregate the writes to data_off, refcnt, nb_segs and port
> to an uint64_t data and write the data in one shot
> with uint64_t* at &mbuf->rearm_data address.
> 
> Some of the non-IA platforms have store operation overhead
> if the store address is not naturally aligned.This patch
> fixes the performance issue on those targets.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jerin Jacob <jerin.jacob at caviumnetworks.com>
> ---
> 
> Tested this patch on IA and non-IA(ThunderX) platforms.
> This patch shows 400Kpps/core improvement on ThunderX + ixgbe + vector environment.
> and this patch does not have any overhead on IA platform.
> 
> Have tried an another similar approach by replacing "buf_len" with "pad"
> (in this patch context),
> Since it has additional overhead on read and then mask to keep "buf_len" intact,
> not much improvement is not shown.
> ref: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-May/038914.html
> 
> ---
While this will work and from your tests doesn't seem to have a performance
impact, I'm not sure I particularly like it. It's extending out the end of
cacheline0 of the mbuf by 16 bytes, though I suppose it's not technically using
up any more space of it.

What I'm wondering about though, is do we have any usecases where we need a
variable buf_len for packets for RX. These mbufs come directly from a mempool,
which is generally understood to be a set of fixed-sized buffers. I realise that
this change was made in the past after some discussion, but one of the key points
there [at least to my reading] was that - even though nobody actually made a
concrete case where they had variable-sized buffers - having support for them
made no performance difference.

The latter part of that has now changed, and supporting variable-sized mbufs
from an mbuf pool has a perf impact. Do we definitely need that functionality,
because the easiest fix here is just to move the rxrearm marker back above
mbuf_len as it was originally in releases like 1.8?

Regards,
/Bruce

Ref: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2014-December/009432.html