Merge branch 'net-sched-taprio-change-schedules'
Vinicius Costa Gomes says: ==================== net/sched: taprio change schedules Changes from RFC: - Removed the patches for taprio offloading, because of the lack of in-tree users; - Updated the links to point to the PATCH version of this series; Original cover letter: Overview -------- This RFC has two objectives, it adds support for changing the running schedules during "runtime", explained in more detail later, and proposes an interface between taprio and the drivers for hardware offloading. These two different features are presented together so it's clear what the "final state" would look like. But after the RFC stage, they can be proposed (and reviewed) separately. Changing the schedules without disrupting traffic is important for handling dynamic use cases, for example, when streams are added/removed and when the network configuration changes. Hardware offloading support allows schedules to be more precise and have lower resource usage. Changing schedules ------------------ The same as the other interfaces we proposed, we try to use the same concepts as the IEEE 802.1Q-2018 specification. So, for changing schedules, there are an "oper" (operational) and an "admin" schedule. The "admin" schedule is mutable and not in use, the "oper" schedule is immutable and is in use. That is, when the user first adds an schedule it is in the "admin" state, and it becomes "oper" when its base-time (basically when it starts) is reached. What this means is that now it's possible to create taprio with a schedule: $ tc qdisc add dev IFACE parent root handle 100 taprio \ num_tc 3 \ map 2 2 1 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 \ queues 1@0 1@1 2@2 \ base-time 10000000 \ sched-entry S 03 300000 \ sched-entry S 02 300000 \ sched-entry S 06 400000 \ clockid CLOCK_TAI And then, later, after the previous schedule is "promoted" to "oper", add a new ("admin") schedule to be used some time later: $ tc qdisc change dev IFACE parent root handle 100 taprio \ base-time 1553121866000000000 \ sched-entry S 02 500000 \ sched-entry S 0f 400000 \ clockid CLOCK_TAI When enabling the ability to change schedules, it makes sense to add two more defined knobs to schedules: "cycle-time" allows to truncate a cycle to some value, so it repeats after a well-defined value; "cycle-time-extension" controls how much an entry can be extended if it's the last one before the change of schedules, the reason is to avoid a very small cycle when transitioning from a schedule to another. With these, taprio in the software mode should provide a fairly complete implementation of what's defined in the Enhancements for Scheduled Traffic parts of the specification. Hardware offload ---------------- Some workloads require better guarantees from their schedules than what's provided by the software implementation. This series proposes an interface for configuring schedules into compatible network controllers. This part is proposed together with the support for changing schedules, because it raises questions like, should the "qdisc" side be responsible of providing visibility into the schedules or should it be the driver? In this proposal, the driver is called passing the new schedule as soon as it is validated, and the "core" qdisc takes care of displaying (".dump()") the correct schedules at all times. It means that some logic would need to be duplicated in the driver, if the hardware doesn't have support for multiple schedules. But as taprio doesn't have enough information about the underlying controller to know how much in advance a schedule needs to be informed to the hardware, it feels like a fair compromise. The hardware offloading part of this proposal also tries to define an interface for frame-preemption and how it interacts with the scheduling of traffic, see Section 8.6.8.4 of IEEE 802.1Q-2018 for more information. One important difference between the qdisc interface and the qdisc-driver interface, is that the "gate mask" on the qdisc side references traffic classes, that is bit 0 of the gate mask means Traffic Class 0, and in the driver interface, it specifies the queues, that is bit 0 means queue 0. That is to say that taprio converts the references to traffic classes to references to queues before sending the offloading request to the driver. Request for help ---------------- I would like that interested driver maintainers could take a look at the proposed interface and see if it's going to be too awkward for any particular device. Also, pointers to available documentation would be appreciated. The idea here is to start a discussion so we can have an interface that would work for multiple vendors. Links ----- kernel patches: https://github.com/vcgomes/net-next/tree/taprio-add-support-for-change-v3 iproute2 patches: https://github.com/vcgomes/iproute2/tree/taprio-add-support-for-change-v3 ==================== Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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