• David Woodhouse's avatar
    ppp: Don't stop and restart queue on every TX packet · e675f0cc
    David Woodhouse authored
    For every transmitted packet, ppp_start_xmit() will stop the netdev
    queue and then, if appropriate, restart it. This causes the TX softirq
    to run, entirely gratuitously.
    
    This is "only" a waste of CPU time in the normal case, but it's actively
    harmful when the PPP device is a TEQL slave — the wakeup will cause the
    offending device to receive the next TX packet from the TEQL queue, when
    it *should* have gone to the next slave in the list. We end up seeing
    large bursts of packets on just *one* slave device, rather than using
    the full available bandwidth over all slaves.
    
    This patch fixes the problem by *not* unconditionally stopping the queue
    in ppp_start_xmit(). It adds a return value from ppp_xmit_process()
    which indicates whether the queue should be stopped or not.
    
    It *doesn't* remove the call to netif_wake_queue() from
    ppp_xmit_process(), because other code paths (especially from
    ppp_output_wakeup()) need it there and it's messy to push it out to the
    other callers to do it based on the return value. So we leave it in
    place — it's a no-op in the case where the queue wasn't stopped, so it's
    harmless in the TX path.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Woodhouse <David.Woodhouse@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    e675f0cc
ppp_generic.c 69.5 KB