Commit 11848b96 authored Jul 19, 2010 by Michael Chan Committed by David S. Miller Jul 19, 2010

bnx2: Remove some unnecessary smp_mb() in tx fast path.



smp_mb() inside bnx2_tx_avail() is used twice in the normal
bnx2_start_xmit() path (see illustration below).  The full memory
barrier is only necessary during race conditions with tx completion.
We can speed up the tx path by replacing smp_mb() in bnx2_tx_avail()
with a compiler barrier.  The compiler barrier is to force the
compiler to fetch the tx_prod and tx_cons from memory.

In the race condition between bnx2_start_xmit() and bnx2_tx_int(),
we have the following situation:

bnx2_start_xmit()                       bnx2_tx_int()
    if (!bnx2_tx_avail())
            BUG();

    ...

    if (!bnx2_tx_avail())
            netif_tx_stop_queue();          update_tx_index();
            smp_mb();                       smp_mb();
            if (bnx2_tx_avail())            if (netif_tx_queue_stopped() &&
                    netif_tx_wake_queue();      bnx2_tx_avail())

With smp_mb() removed from bnx2_tx_avail(), we need to add smp_mb() to
bnx2_start_xmit() as shown above to properly order netif_tx_stop_queue()
and bnx2_tx_avail() to check the ring index.  If it is not strictly
ordered, the tx queue can be stopped forever.

This improves performance by about 5% with 2 ports running bi-directional
64-byte packets.

Reviewed-by: Benjamin Li <benli@broadcom.com>
Reviewed-by: Matt Carlson <mcarlson@broadcom.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Chan <mchan@broadcom.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

parent 379b39a2

drivers/net/bnx2.c

+9 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -253,7 +253,8 @@ static inline u32 bnx2_tx_avail(struct bnx2 bp, struct bnx2_tx_ring_info txr)
		{
		u32 diff;

		smp_mb();
		/* Tell compiler to fetch tx_prod and tx_cons from memory. */
		barrier();

		/* The ring uses 256 indices for 255 entries, one of them
		* needs to be skipped.
		@@ -6534,6 +6535,13 @@ bnx2_start_xmit(struct sk_buff skb, struct net_device dev)

		if (unlikely(bnx2_tx_avail(bp, txr) <= MAX_SKB_FRAGS)) {
		netif_tx_stop_queue(txq);

		/* netif_tx_stop_queue() must be done before checking
		* tx index in bnx2_tx_avail() below, because in
		* bnx2_tx_int(), we update tx index before checking for
		* netif_tx_queue_stopped().
		*/
		smp_mb();
		if (bnx2_tx_avail(bp, txr) > bp->tx_wake_thresh)
		netif_tx_wake_queue(txq);
		}

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