[dpdk-dev] eventdev: sw rx adapter enqueue caching

[Rao, Nikhil]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Elo, Matias (Nokia -
> FI/Espoo)
> Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 5:33 PM
> To: Mattias Rönnblom <hofors at lysator.liu.se>
> Cc: Honnappa Nagarahalli <Honnappa.Nagarahalli at arm.com>;
> dev at dpdk.org; nd <nd at arm.com>
> Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] eventdev: sw rx adapter enqueue caching
> 
> 
> 
> On 7 May 2019, at 15:01, Mattias Rönnblom
> <hofors at lysator.liu.se<mailto:hofors at lysator.liu.se>> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 2019-05-07 13:12, Honnappa Nagarahalli wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The SW eventdev rx adapter has an internal enqueue buffer 'rx_adapter-
> event_enqueue_buffer', which stores packets received from the NIC until at
> least BATCH_SIZE (=32) packets have been received before enqueueing them
> to eventdev. For example in case of validation testing, where often a small
> number of specific test packets is sent to the NIC, this causes a lot of
> problems. One would always have to transmit at least BATCH_SIZE test
> packets before anything can be received from eventdev. Additionally, if the
> rx
> packet rate is slow this also adds a considerable amount of additional delay.
> 
> Looking at the rx adapter API and sw implementation code there doesn’t
> seem to be a way to disable this internal caching. In my opinion this
> “functionality" makes testing sw rx adapter so cumbersome that either the
> implementation should be modified to enqueue the cached packets after a
> while (some performance penalty) or there should be some method to
> disable caching. Any opinions how this issue could be fixed?
> At the minimum, I would think there should be a compile time option.
> From a use case perspective, I think it falls under latency vs throughput
> considerations. If there is a latency sensitive application, it might not want
> to wait till 32 packets are received.
> 
> From what I understood from Matias Elo and also after a quick glance in the
> code, the unlucky packets will be buffered indefinitely, in case the system
> goes idle. This is totally unacceptable (both in production and validation), in
> my opinion, and should be filed as a bug.
> 
> 
> Indeed, this is what happens. I’ll create a bug report to track this issue.
> 
I have posted a patch for this issue
http://patchwork.dpdk.org/patch/53350/

Please let me know your comments.

Thanks,
Nikhil