Hi Ferruh,

In my case, the traffic is not large, so I can't see the impact.
I also tested under high load(>2Mpps with 2 DPDK cores and 2 kernel threads)
and found no significant difference in performance either.
I think the reason should be that it will not
run to 'kni_fifo_count(kni->alloc_q) == 0' under high load.

On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 8:47 PM Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit@amd.com> wrote:
On 12/30/2022 4:23 AM, Yangchao Zhou wrote:
> In some scenarios, mbufs returned by rte_kni_rx_burst are not freed
> immediately. So kni_allocate_mbufs may be failed, but we don't know.
>
> Even worse, when alloc_q is completely exhausted, kni_net_tx in
> rte_kni.ko will drop all tx packets. kni_allocate_mbufs is never
> called again, even if the mbufs are eventually freed.
>
> In this patch, we try to allocate mbufs for alloc_q when it is empty.
>
> According to historical experience, the performance bottleneck of KNI
> is offen the usleep_range of kni thread in rte_kni.ko.
> The check of kni_fifo_count is trivial and the cost should be acceptable.
>

Hi Yangchao,

Are you observing any performance impact with this change in you use case?


> Fixes: 3e12a98fe397 ("kni: optimize Rx burst")
> Cc: stable@dpdk.org
>
> Signed-off-by: Yangchao Zhou <zhouyates@gmail.com>
> ---
>  lib/kni/rte_kni.c | 4 ++--
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/lib/kni/rte_kni.c b/lib/kni/rte_kni.c
> index 8ab6c47153..bfa6a001ff 100644
> --- a/lib/kni/rte_kni.c
> +++ b/lib/kni/rte_kni.c
> @@ -634,8 +634,8 @@ rte_kni_rx_burst(struct rte_kni *kni, struct rte_mbuf **mbufs, unsigned int num)
>  {
>       unsigned int ret = kni_fifo_get(kni->tx_q, (void **)mbufs, num);

> -     /* If buffers removed, allocate mbufs and then put them into alloc_q */
> -     if (ret)
> +     /* If buffers removed or alloc_q is empty, allocate mbufs and then put them into alloc_q */
> +     if (ret || (kni_fifo_count(kni->alloc_q) == 0))
>               kni_allocate_mbufs(kni);

>       return ret;