Re: [PATCH net-next v4 4/5] page_pool: remove PP_FLAG_PAGE_FRAG flag

[Alexander Lobakin]

From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 10:19:54 -0700

> On Mon, 12 Jun 2023 21:02:55 +0800 Yunsheng Lin wrote:
>>  	struct page_pool_params pp_params = {
>> -		.flags = PP_FLAG_DMA_MAP | PP_FLAG_PAGE_FRAG |
>> -				PP_FLAG_DMA_SYNC_DEV,
>> +		.flags = PP_FLAG_DMA_MAP | PP_FLAG_DMA_SYNC_DEV,
>>  		.order = hns3_page_order(ring),
> 
> Does hns3_page_order() set a good example for the users?
> 
> static inline unsigned int hns3_page_order(struct hns3_enet_ring *ring)
> {
> #if (PAGE_SIZE < 8192)
> 	if (ring->buf_size > (PAGE_SIZE / 2))
> 		return 1;
> #endif
> 	return 0;
> }

Oh lol, just what Intel drivers do. They don't have a pool to keep some
bunch of pages (they can recycle a page only within its buffer), so in
order to still recycle them, they allocate order-1 pages to be able to
flip the halves >_<

> 
> Why allocate order 1 pages for buffers which would fit in a single page?
> I feel like this soft of heuristic should be built into the API itself.

Offtop:

I tested this series with IAVF: very little perf regression* (almost
stddev) comparing to just 1-page-per-frame Page Pool series, but 21 Mb
less RAM taken comparing to both "old" PP series and baseline, nice :D

(+Cc David Christensen, he'll be glad to hear we're stopping eating 64Kb
 pages)

* this might be caused by that in the previous version I was hardcoding
truesize, but now it depends on what page_pool_alloc() returns. Same for
Rx offset: it was always 0 previously, as every frame was placed at the
start of page, now depends on how PP places** it.
With MTU of 1500 and no XDP, two frames fit into one 4k page. With XDP
on (increased headroom) or increased MTU, PP starts effectively do
1-frame-per-page with literally no changes in performance (increased RAM
usage obviously -- I mean, it gets restored to the baseline numbers).

** BTW, instead of 2048 + 2048, I'm getting 1920 + 2176. Maybe the stack
would be happier to see more consistent truesize for cache purposes.
I'll try to play with it.

Thanks,
Olek