Re: Irq architecture for multi-core network driver.

[Chetan Loke <chetanloke@gmail.com>]

>>
>> Does your hardware do flow-based queues?  In this model you have
>> multiple rx queues and the hardware hashes incoming packets to a single
>> queue based on the addresses, ports, etc. This ensures that all the
>> packets of a single connection always get processed in the order they
>> arrived at the net device.
>>
>
> Indeed, this is exactly what we have.
>
>
>> Typically in this model you have as many interrupts as queues
>> (presumably 16 in your case).  Each queue is assigned an interrupt and
>> that interrupt is affined to a single core.
>

> Certainly this is one mode of operation that should be supported, but I
> would also like to be able to go for raw throughput and have as many cores
> as possible reading from a single queue (like I currently have).
>
Well, you could let the NIC firmware(f/w) handle this. The f/w would
know which interrupt was just injected recently.In other words it
would have a history of which CPU's would be available. So if some
previously interrupted CPU isn't making good progress then the
firmware should route the incoming response packets to a different
queue. This way some other CPU will pick it up.


> David Daney
> --
Chetan Loke