[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] net/mlx5: add Rx checksum offload flag return bad

[Slava Ovsiienko]

Hi, Jiawei

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jiawei Zhu <17826875952 at 163.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 18:22
> To: Slava Ovsiienko <viacheslavo at nvidia.com>; dev at dpdk.org
> Cc: zhujiawei12 at huawei.com; Matan Azrad <matan at nvidia.com>; Shahaf
> Shuler <shahafs at nvidia.com>
> Subject: Re: [PATCH] net/mlx5: add Rx checksum offload flag return bad
> 
> Hi，Slava
> 
> Thanks for your explain，the multiplications and divisions are in the
> TRANSPOSE，not in the rte_be_to_cpu_16. 

[SO]
Yes, TRANSPOSE is the macro with mul and div operators. But, these ones
are translated by compiler to the simple shifts (due to operands are power of 2).
The only place where TRANSPOSE is used is the rxq_cq_to_ol_flags() routine.
I've compiled this one  and provided the assembly listing - please see one
in my previous reply. It illustrates how TRASPOSE was compiled to and 
presents the x86 code - we see only shifts:

43 0047 48C1EA02 	 shrq $2,%rdx
44 004b 48C1E802 	 shrq $2,%rax

No any mul/div, exactly as we expected.

> So I think use if-else directly could improves the performance.

[SO]
The if/else construction is usually compiled to conditional jumps, the branch
prediction in CPU over the various ingress traffic patterns  (we are analyzing the
flags of the received packets) might not work well and we’ll get performance penalty.
Hence, it seems the best practice is not to have the conditional jumps at all.
The existing code follows this approach as we can see from the assembly listing - there
is no conditional jumps.

With best regards,
Slava

PS. Just removed embarrassing details from the listing - this is merely the resulting code
of rxq_cq_to_ol_flags(). I removed static and made this one non-inline to see the
isolated piece of code:

rxq_cq_to_ol_flags:
  movzwl 28(%rdi),%edx   // endianness conversion optimized out at all
  movl %edx,%eax
  andw $512,%dx
  andw $1024,%ax
  movzwl %dx,%edx
  movzwl %ax,%eax
  shrq $2,%rdx
  shrq $2,%rax
  orl %edx,%eax
  ret

PPS. As we can see - the shift values are the same for both flags, so there might be some area to optimize
(we could have only one shift and only one masking with AND)