Thank you! Yes, it filled the last missing pieces :) Lesson learned -
memory allocations are not free, after all.
On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 10:54 PM, Alexander Duyck <alexander.du...@gmail.com
> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 4:52 AM, Michał Purzyński
> <michalpurzyns...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Could you fill me in on how the bounce buffer approach to memory
> management
> > in IXGBE and I40E works?
> >
> > Why do you allocate the same amount of memory in
> ixgbe_setup_rx_resources()
> > twice?
> > First time with a call to rx_ring->rx_buffer_info = vzalloc_node() -
> where
> > size represents what I set with ethtool -G (N buffers, each represented
> > with a struct ixgbe_rx_buffer).
> > Second in the rx_ring->desc = dma_alloc_coherent() of the same size as
> > above.
>
> There are two different buffers being allocated here. The first is
> the rx_buffer_info which store data used by the driver to track memory
> allocations, DMA addresses, and page offsets. The allocation into
> desc is for descriptor rings used to signal between the device and the
> driver where the buffers are at, and information about the packets
> written back.
>
> > Second question. So we have a single ring (per queue) with a chains of
> > buffers "attached" to it - a chunk of memory composed from multiple
> pages.
> > Each page will have a single packet.
> > Does the driver replace "used" pages every time it uses one? I'm
> confused,
> > because that's kind of logical it does, there are functions doing that,
> yet
> > there are comments in the driver that "we are reusing buffers".
> >
> > My understanding is that once a page (2048 bytes here) contains a packet
> > data, it is only "re-attached" to SKB with minimal copying (header,
> > basically). That would require allocating a new page every time we used
> > one - attached it to SKB.
>
> A page is 4096 bytes in size. One trick we are using is to only use
> 2048 bytes of it at a time, then we move over to the other half by
> XORing the page offset value by 2048. The pages themselves have a
> reference count and as long as the reference count is 1 we can
> increase the reference count by one and always use the other half of
> the page. The stack itself should release the page reference reducing
> the reference count back to 1 hopefully before we will need to use
> that portion of the buffer again. If the reference count is greater
> than 1 we will free hand the page off to the stack and instead
> allocate a new page to replace it via the <driver>_alloc_mapped_page
> call.
>
> Hope that helps to clarify things a bit.
>
> - Alex
>
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