virtio_net: VIRTIO_NET_F_MSG_RXBUF (imprive rcv buffer allocation)

If segmentation offload is enabled by the host, we currently allocate
maximum sized packet buffers and pass them to the host. This uses up
20 ring entries, allowing us to supply only 20 packet buffers to the
host with a 256 entry ring. This is a huge overhead when receiving
small packets, and is most keenly felt when receiving MTU sized
packets from off-host.

The VIRTIO_NET_F_MRG_RXBUF feature flag is set by hosts which support
using receive buffers which are smaller than the maximum packet size.
In order to transfer large packets to the guest, the host merges
together multiple receive buffers to form a larger logical buffer.
The number of merged buffers is returned to the guest via a field in
the virtio_net_hdr.

Make use of this support by supplying single page receive buffers to
the host. On receive, we extract the virtio_net_hdr, copy 128 bytes of
the payload to the skb's linear data buffer and adjust the fragment
offset to point to the remaining data. This ensures proper alignment
and allows us to not use any paged data for small packets. If the
payload occupies multiple pages, we simply append those pages as
fragments and free the associated skbs.

This scheme allows us to be efficient in our use of ring entries
while still supporting large packets. Benchmarking using netperf from
an external machine to a guest over a 10Gb/s network shows a 100%
improvement from ~1Gb/s to ~2Gb/s. With a local host->guest benchmark
with GSO disabled on the host side, throughput was seen to increase
from 700Mb/s to 1.7Gb/s.

Based on a patch from Herbert Xu.

Signed-off-by: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> (use netdev_priv)
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/virtio_net.h b/include/linux/virtio_net.h
index 5e33761..5cdd0aa 100644
--- a/include/linux/virtio_net.h
+++ b/include/linux/virtio_net.h
@@ -20,6 +20,7 @@
 #define VIRTIO_NET_F_HOST_TSO6	12	/* Host can handle TSOv6 in. */
 #define VIRTIO_NET_F_HOST_ECN	13	/* Host can handle TSO[6] w/ ECN in. */
 #define VIRTIO_NET_F_HOST_UFO	14	/* Host can handle UFO in. */
+#define VIRTIO_NET_F_MRG_RXBUF	15	/* Host can merge receive buffers. */
 
 struct virtio_net_config
 {
@@ -44,4 +45,12 @@ struct virtio_net_hdr
 	__u16 csum_start;	/* Position to start checksumming from */
 	__u16 csum_offset;	/* Offset after that to place checksum */
 };
+
+/* This is the version of the header to use when the MRG_RXBUF
+ * feature has been negotiated. */
+struct virtio_net_hdr_mrg_rxbuf {
+	struct virtio_net_hdr hdr;
+	__u16 num_buffers;	/* Number of merged rx buffers */
+};
+
 #endif /* _LINUX_VIRTIO_NET_H */