When trying to reach high Rx throughput of more than 500Mbps on
a device with a relatively weak CPU (Atom x5-Z8500), CPU utilization
may become a bottleneck. Analysis showed that we are looping in
iwl_pcie_rx_handle for very long periods which led to starvation
of other threads (iwl_pcie_rx_handle runs with _bh disabled).
We were handling Rx and allocating new buffers and the new buffers
were ready quickly enough to be available before we had finished
handling all the buffers available in the hardware. As a
consequence, we called iwl_pcie_rxq_restock to refill the hardware
with the new buffers, and start again handling new buffers without
exiting the function. Since we read the hardware pointer again when
we goto restart, new buffers were handled immediately instead of
exiting the function.
This patch avoids refilling RBs inside rx handling loop, unless an
emergency situation is reached. It also doesn't read the hardware
pointer again unless we are in an emergency (unlikely) case.
This significantly reduce the maximal time we spend in
iwl_pcie_rx_handle with _bh disabled.
Signed-off-by: Gregory Greenman <gregory.greenman@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Emmanuel Grumbach <emmanuel.grumbach@intel.com>
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