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Date:      Sat, 01 Mar 2014 17:46:32 +0100
From:      Ilya Bakulin <ilya@bakulin.de>
To:        Adrian Chadd <adrian.chadd@gmail.com>
Cc:        "freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>, Alexander Motin <mav@freebsd.org>, "freebsd-arm@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arm@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: MMC/SDIO stack under CAM
Message-ID:  <53120EE8.1080600@bakulin.de>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ-VmomNzCMc1T=0jAnyd_uGXbvgeTzZTtmhUPSvZ0DKUEjtKg@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20140216111153.GA74858@olymp.kibab.com> <5C2CF572-360D-4CA0-81C7-18A5C455AED5@bsdimp.com> <20140224142642.GA32538@olymp.kibab.com> <CAJ-VmomNzCMc1T=0jAnyd_uGXbvgeTzZTtmhUPSvZ0DKUEjtKg@mail.gmail.com>

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Hi Adrian,

On 24.02.14, 16:59, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> hi,
>=20
> Let me just reiterate some .. well, experience doing this stuff at QCA.=

>=20
> You really, absolutely don't want too much overhead in the MMC/SDIO
> path between whatever is issuing things and the network driver.
>=20
> There was significant performance work done at QCA on a local MMC/SDIO
> driver and bus to get extremely low latency and CPU utilisation when
> pushing around small transactions. The current CAM locking model is
> not geared towards getting to high transaction rates.

So here you mean some work done on Linux MMC/SDIO stack by QCA
which made it far better than current Linux MMC stack in terms of
high SDIO I/O rates?

>=20
> You may think this is a very architecturally pretty solution and it
> indeed may be. But if it doesn't perform as well as the existing local
> hacks that vendors have done, no company deploying this hardware is
> going to want to use it. They'll end up realising there's this massive
> CAM storage layer in between and either have to sit down to rip it up
> and replace it with something lightweight, or they'll say "screw it"
> and go back to the vendor supplied hacked up Linux solution.

I think that if the "architecturally pretty solution" behaves worse than
some ugly hacks, then it may be not so pretty or the architecture is
just broken
by design.

> So I highly recommend you profile things - and profile things with
> lots of small transactions. If the CAM overhead is more than a tiny,
> tiny fraction of CPU at 25,000 pps, your solution won't scale. :-)

I don't really know what to compare with. For MMC/SD cards it is pretty
obvious, but then these cards will be likely the bottleneck, not the stac=
k.
And the only goal would be to not make the stack slower than it is now.
But, as ATA devices are much faster than MMC/SD, I don't think this will
be a problem.

For SDIO things are different. But we don't have any drivers (yet), excep=
t
mv_sdiowl that I'm writing, to test on. So I have to bring the SDIO
stack on CAM,
than bring mv_sdiowl to the state when it can actually transmit the
data, and then
compare performance with the vendor-supplied Linux driver.
We'll see then if there is a room for improvement...

--=20
Regards,
Ilya Bakulin


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