Re: [PATCH V4 0/5] mlx5 ConnectX control misc driver

[David Ahern]

On 2/9/24 6:01 PM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 09, 2024 at 03:42:16PM -0700, David Ahern wrote:
>> On 2/8/24 7:15 PM, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
>>>>> Ah yes, the high frequency counters. Something that is definitely
>>>>> impossible to implement in a generic way. You were literally in the
>>>>> room at netconf when David Ahern described his proposal for this.
>>
>> The key point of that proposal is host memory mapped to userspace where
>> H/W counters land (either via direct DMA by a H/W push or a
>> kthread/timer pulling in updates). That is similar to what is proposed here.
> 
> The counter experiment that inspired Saeed to write about it here was
> done using mlx5ctl interfaces and some other POC stuff on an RDMA
> network monitoring RDMA workloads, inspecting RDMA objects.
> 
> So if your proposal also considers how to select RDMA object counters,
> control the detailed sampling hardware with RDMA stuff, and works
> on a netdev-free InfiniBand network, then it might be interesting.

Response at netconf in September was mixed. As I recall Jakub for
example was shaking his head at 'yet another stats proposal', but since
he has referenced it a couple of times now maybe it is worth moving
beyond slides to a POC. The uapi discussed was netlink (genl) based;
driver hooks were not discussed. Perhaps I can get a working POC for
both stacks by netdevconf in July.