• Jesse Brandeburg's avatar
    e1000: add dynamic itr modes · 835bb129
    Jesse Brandeburg authored
    Add a new dynamic itr algorithm, with 2 modes, and make it the default
    operation mode. This greatly reduces latency and increases small packet
    performance, at the "cost" of some CPU utilization. Bulk traffic
    throughput is unaffected.
    
    The driver can limit the amount of interrupts per second that the
    adapter will generate for incoming packets. It does this by writing a
    value to the adapter that is based on the maximum amount of interrupts
    that the adapter will generate per second.
    
    Setting InterruptThrottleRate to a value greater or equal to 100 will
    program the adapter to send out a maximum of that many interrupts per
    second, even if more packets have come in. This reduces interrupt
    load on the system and can lower CPU utilization under heavy load,
    but will increase latency as packets are not processed as quickly.
    
    The default behaviour of the driver previously assumed a static
    InterruptThrottleRate value of 8000, providing a good fallback value
    for all traffic types,but lacking in small packet performance and
    latency. The hardware can handle many more small packets per second
    however, and for this reason an adaptive interrupt moderation algorithm
    was implemented.
    
    Since 7.3.x, the driver has two adaptive modes (setting 1 or 3) in
    which it dynamically adjusts the InterruptThrottleRate value based on
    the traffic that it receives. After determining the type of incoming
    traffic in the last timeframe, it will adjust the InterruptThrottleRate
    to an appropriate value for that traffic.
    
    The algorithm classifies the incoming traffic every interval into
    classes.  Once the class is determined, the InterruptThrottleRate
    value is adjusted to suit that traffic type the best. There are
    three classes defined: "Bulk traffic", for large amounts of packets
    of normal size; "Low latency", for small amounts of traffic and/or
    a significant percentage of small packets; and "Lowest latency",
    for almost completely small packets or minimal traffic.
    
    In dynamic conservative mode, the InterruptThrottleRate value is
    set to 4000 for traffic that falls in class "Bulk traffic". If
    traffic falls in the "Low latency" or "Lowest latency" class, the
    InterruptThrottleRate is increased stepwise to 20000. This default
    mode is suitable for most applications.
    
    For situations where low latency is vital such as cluster or
    grid computing, the algorithm can reduce latency even more when
    InterruptThrottleRate is set to mode 1. In this mode, which operates
    the same as mode 3, the InterruptThrottleRate will be increased
    stepwise to 70000 for traffic in class "Lowest latency".
    
    Setting InterruptThrottleRate to 0 turns off any interrupt moderation
    and may improve small packet latency, but is generally not suitable
    for bulk throughput traffic.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJesse Brandeburg <jesse.brandeburg@intel.com>
    Cc: Rick Jones <rick.jones2@hp.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAuke Kok <auke-jan.h.kok@intel.com>
    835bb129
e1000_main.c 149 KB