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Date:   Wed, 10 Oct 2018 10:36:26 -0400
From:   "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>
To:     Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com>
Cc:     Tiwei Bie <tiwei.bie@intel.com>,
        virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org,
        virtio-dev@lists.oasis-open.org, wexu@redhat.com,
        jfreimann@redhat.com
Subject: Re: [virtio-dev] Re: [PATCH net-next v2 0/5] virtio: support packed
 ring
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On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 05:47:29PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2018年09月13日 16:59, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> > > If what you say is true then we should take a careful look
> > > and not supporting these generic things with packed layout.
> > > Once we do support them it will be too late and we won't
> > > be able to get performance back.
> > I think it's a good point that we don't need to support
> > everything in packed ring (especially these which would
> > hurt the performance), as the packed ring aims at high
> > performance. I'm also wondering about the features. Is
> > there any possibility that we won't support the out of
> > order processing (at least not by default) in packed ring?
> > If I didn't miss anything, the need to support out of order
> > processing in packed ring will make the data structure
> > inside the driver not cache friendly which is similar to
> > the case of the descriptor table in the split ring (the
> > difference is that, it only happens in driver now).
> 
> Out of order is not the only user, DMA is another one. We don't have used
> ring(len), so we need to maintain buffer length somewhere even for in order
> device.

For a bunch of systems dma unmap is a nop so we do not really
need to maintain it. It's a question of an API to detect that
and optimize for it. I posted a proposed patch for that -
want to try using that?

> But if it's not too late, I second for a OUT_OF_ORDER feature.
> Starting from in order can have much simpler code in driver.
> 
> Thanks

It's tricky to change the flag polarity because of compatibility
with legacy interfaces. Why is this such a big deal?

Let's teach drivers about IN_ORDER, then if devices
are in order it will get enabled by default.

-- 
MST