One of the thing we discussed during netdev 2011 conference was the idea
to change some network drivers to allocate/populate their skb at RX
completion time, right before feeding the skb to network stack.

In old days, we allocated skbs when populating the RX ring.

This means bringing into cpu cache sk_buff and skb_shared_info cache
lines (since we clear/initialize them), then 'queue' skb->data to NIC.

By the time NIC fills a frame in skb->data buffer and host can process
it, cpu probably threw away the cache lines from its caches, because lot
of things happened between the allocation and final use.

So the deal would be to allocate only the data buffer for the NIC to
populate its RX ring buffer. And use build_skb() at RX completion to
attach a data buffer (now filled with an ethernet frame) to a new skb,
initialize the skb_shared_info portion, and give the hot skb to network
stack.

build_skb() is the function to allocate an skb, caller providing the
data buffer that should be attached to it. Drivers are expected to call
skb_reserve() right after build_skb() to adjust skb->data to the
Ethernet frame (usually skipping NET_SKB_PAD and NET_IP_ALIGN, but some
drivers might add a hardware provided alignment)

Data provided to build_skb() MUST have been allocated by a prior
kmalloc() call, with enough room to add SKB_DATA_ALIGN(sizeof(struct
skb_shared_info)) bytes at the end of the data without corrupting
incoming frame.

data = kmalloc(NET_SKB_PAD + NET_IP_ALIGN + 1536 +
               SKB_DATA_ALIGN(sizeof(struct skb_shared_info)),
	       GFP_ATOMIC);
...
skb = build_skb(data);
if (!skb) {
	recycle_data(data);
} else {
	skb_reserve(skb, NET_SKB_PAD + NET_IP_ALIGN);
	...
}
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
CC: Eilon Greenstein <eilong@broadcom.com>
CC: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
CC: Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>
CC: Jamal Hadi Salim <hadi@mojatatu.com>
CC: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
CC: Thomas Graf <tgraf@infradead.org>
CC: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
CC: Jeff Kirsher <jeffrey.t.kirsher@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>