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    virtio-net: Introduce a new bottom half packet TX · a697a334
    Alex Williamson authored
    
    
    Based on a patch from Mark McLoughlin, this patch introduces a new
    bottom half packet transmitter that avoids the latency imposed by
    the tx_timer approach.  Rather than scheduling a timer when a TX
    packet comes in, schedule a bottom half to be run from the iothread.
    The bottom half handler first attempts to flush the queue with
    notification disabled (this is where we could race with a guest
    without txburst).  If we flush a full burst, reschedule immediately.
    If we send short of a full burst, try to re-enable notification.
    To avoid a race with TXs that may have occurred, we must then
    flush again.  If we find some packets to send, the guest it probably
    active, so we can reschedule again.
    
    tx_timer and tx_bh are mutually exclusive, so we can re-use the
    tx_waiting flag to indicate one or the other needs to be setup.
    This allows us to seamlessly migrate between timer and bh TX
    handling.
    
    The bottom half handler becomes the new default and we add a new
    tx= option to virtio-net-pci.  Usage:
    
    -device virtio-net-pci,tx=timer # select timer mitigation vs "bh"
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
    a697a334