• Santiago Leon's avatar
    [PATCH] ibmveth change buffer pools dynamically · 860f242e
    Santiago Leon authored
    This patch provides a sysfs interface to change some properties of the
    ibmveth buffer pools (size of the buffers, number of buffers per pool,
    and whether a pool is active).  Ethernet drivers use ethtool to provide
    this type of functionality.  However, the buffers in the ibmveth driver
    can have an arbitrary size (not only regular, mini, and jumbo which are
    the only sizes that ethtool can change), and also ibmveth can have an
    arbitrary number of buffer pools
    
    Under heavy load we have seen dropped packets which obviously kills TCP
    performance.  We have created several fixes that mitigate this issue,
    but we definitely need a way of changing the number of buffers for an
    adapter dynamically.  Also, changing the size of the buffers allows
    users to change the MTU to something big (bigger than a jumbo frame)
    greatly improving performance on partition to partition transfers.
    
    The patch creates directories pool1...pool4 in the device directory in
    sysfs, each with files: num, size, and active (which default to the
    values in the mainline version).
    
    Comments and suggestions are welcome...
    --
    Santiago A. Leon
    Power Linux Development
    IBM Linux Technology Center
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
    860f242e
ibmveth.h 5.72 KB