Commit 44653eae authored Jul 25, 2008 by Rusty Russell

virtio: don't always force a notification when ring is full



We force notification when the ring is full, even if the host has
indicated it doesn't want to know.  This seemed like a good idea at
the time: if we fill the transmit ring, we should tell the host
immediately.

Unfortunately this logic also applies to the receiving ring, which is
refilled constantly.  We should introduce real notification thesholds
to replace this logic.  Meanwhile, removing the logic altogether breaks
the heuristics which KVM uses, so we use a hack: only notify if there are
outgoing parts of the new buffer.

Here are the number of exits with lguest's crappy network implementation:
Before:
	network xmit 7859051 recv 236420
After:
	network xmit 7858610 recv 118136

Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>

parent 674bfc23

drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c

+5 −2

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -87,7 +87,10 @@ static int vring_add_buf(struct virtqueue *_vq,
		if (vq->num_free < out + in) {
		pr_debug("Can't add buf len %i - avail = %i\n",
		out + in, vq->num_free);
		/* We notify even if VRING_USED_F_NO_NOTIFY is set here. */
		/* FIXME: for historical reasons, we force a notify here if
		* there are outgoing parts to the buffer. Presumably the
		* host should service the ring ASAP. */
		if (out)
		vq->notify(&vq->vq);
		END_USE(vq);
		return -ENOSPC;