From: Andriy Berestovskyy <aber@semihalf.com>
To: Andrew Bainbridge <andbain@microsoft.com>
Cc: "users@dpdk.org" <users@dpdk.org>
Subject: Re: [dpdk-users] Low level understanding of mbufs needed.
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2017 13:03:53 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAOysbxocc86mQTgAruYy+GOL9T3jL_V94kNm=KKkNkTQREkFzA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <HE1PR83MB0220FF34AE789E0245EA01ADAE910@HE1PR83MB0220.EURPRD83.prod.outlook.com>
Hey Andrew,
Please note that each buffer has a headroom and a tailroom, so
basically you might just encapsulate and decapsulate mbufs in-place,
just modifying the headers and the adjusting the mbuf headroom.
For general description please have a look here:
http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/mbuf_lib.html
The function you might want to use is rte_pktmbuf_adj():
http://dpdk.org/doc/api/rte__mbuf_8h.html#a1bbd752194759ce7b419c4998f2e8651
and rte_pktmbuf_prepend():
http://dpdk.org/doc/api/rte__mbuf_8h.html#aadf5bef4ceb0b76dfafff0895f285ab0
Regards,
Andriy
On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Andrew Bainbridge
<andbain@microsoft.com> wrote:
> I'm a newbie. I want to learn more about to use mbufs to achieve the best throughput. My application is something like a VPN server. In pseudo code:
>
> while 1:
> pkt = recv()
> if pkt.ip.daddr == CLIENT:
> new_pkt = encap(pkt)
> else:
> new_pkt = decap(pkt)
> send(new_pkt)
>
> Where encap() prepends an IP and UDP header, and decap() does the opposite.
>
> Most of each packet I send is the same as one I just received. Is it possible to do the send without having to allocate a new mbuf and memcpy into it?
>
> I want to learn more about how the system works at the low level.
>
> My guess of how it works is that the NIC reads in a packet from the Ethernet cable and writes it into its on-chip SRAM. Once it has enough data buffered, or enough time has elapsed it does a PCIe write request to copy the data into system RAM. The simplest scheme would be to have a single large circular buffer in system RAM and for the packets to be written nose-to-tail into that buffer.
> Does DPDK do that? I guess not. I guess the supported cards all support scatter/gather, which AFAICT means the NICs are smart enough to understand an array of pointers to buffers.
>
> So what then? I have many 1500 byte buffers allocated, and I give the NIC an array of pointers to those buffers. The NIC then "scatters" the input stream into these buffers, one packet per buffer.
>
> I guess the best scheme for my application would be if I could tell the NIC to always leave 30 bytes or so of headroom on each packet, so that I can prepend the extra headers in the encap case. Can I request that when I configure the mbufs?
>
> If you can point me to some kind of tutorial or blog post that covers this area, that would also be helpful.
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
--
Andriy Berestovskyy
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-09-04 11:04 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-09-04 10:44 Andrew Bainbridge
2017-09-04 11:03 ` Andriy Berestovskyy [this message]
2017-09-07 1:47 ` Stephen Hemminger
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