Use of contiguous physical memory in cxgbe driver

[Navdeep Parhar]

On 01/22/14 15:52, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> At this point everyone is well aware that requiring contiguous
> physical page when the hardware can do scatter-gather is a very bad
> idea.

I wouldn't put it this way.  Using buffers with size > PAGE_SIZE has its
advantages.

> I have a new server under test (running 9.2) which uses Chelsio
> rather than Intel 10G Ethernet controllers.  We fixed the Intel driver
> not to use more-than-page-sized jumbo mbufs.  Can anyone say with
> certainty whether the Chelsio hardware actually requires
> physically-contiguous allocations for jumbo frames?

No it doesn't.  It will do a scatter DMA if the next available rx
buffer's size is less than the size of the incoming frame.

> Has this already
> been fixed in a more recent driver?  (The hardware is identified
> specifically as a T420-CR.)

I'm not sure there's anything to fix here but I can add a knob that
would limit the driver to a maximum of PAGE_SIZE sized rx buffers.

Regards,
Navdeep