• Jim Baxter's avatar
    net: cdc_ncm: Reduce memory use when kernel memory low · e1069bbf
    Jim Baxter authored
    The CDC-NCM driver can require large amounts of memory to create
    skb's and this can be a problem when the memory becomes fragmented.
    
    This especially affects embedded systems that have constrained
    resources but wish to maximise the throughput of CDC-NCM with 16KiB
    NTB's.
    
    The issue is after running for a while the kernel memory can become
    fragmented and it needs compacting.
    If the NTB allocation is needed before the memory has been compacted
    the atomic allocation can fail which can cause increased latency,
    large re-transmissions or disconnections depending upon the data
    being transmitted at the time.
    This situation occurs for less than a second until the kernel has
    compacted the memory but the failed devices can take a lot longer to
    recover from the failed TX packets.
    
    To ease this temporary situation I modified the CDC-NCM TX path to
    temporarily switch into a reduced memory mode which allocates an NTB
    that will fit into a USB_CDC_NCM_NTB_MIN_OUT_SIZE (default 2048 Bytes)
    sized memory block and only transmit NTB's with a single network frame
    until the memory situation is resolved.
    Each time this issue occurs we wait for an increasing number of
    reduced size allocations before requesting a full size one to not
    put additional pressure on a low memory system.
    
    Once the memory is compacted the CDC-NCM data can resume transmitting
    at the normal tx_max rate once again.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJim Baxter <jim_baxter@mentor.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarBjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    e1069bbf
cdc_ncm.h 5.41 KB