opnsense-src/sys/dev/ath
Adrian Chadd 1a85141ad4 Pull out the if_transmit() work and revert back to ath_start().
My changed had some rather significant behavioural changes to throughput.
The two issues I noticed:

* With if_start and the ifnet mbuf queue, any temporary latency
  would get eaten up by some mbufs being queued.  With ath_transmit()
  queuing things to ath_buf's, I'd only get 512 TX buffers before I
  couldn't queue any further frames.

* There's also some non-zero latency involved with TX being pushed
  into a taskqueue via direct dispatch.  Any time the scheduler didn't
  immediately schedule the ath TX task would cause extra latency.
  Various 1ge/10ge drivers implement both direct dispatch (if the TX
  lock can be acquired) and deferred task transmission (if the TX lock
  can't be acquired), with frames being pushed into a drbd queue.
  I'll have to do this at some point, but until I figure out how to
  deal with 802.11 fragments, I'll have to wait a while longer.

So what I saw:

* lots of extra latency, specially under load - if the taskqueue
  wasn't immediately scheduled, things went pear shaped;

* any extra latency would result in TX ath_buf's taking their sweet time
  being replenished, so any further calls to ath_transmit() would drop
  mbufs.

* .. yes, there's no explicit backpressure here - things are just dropped.
  Eek.

With this, the general performance has gone up, but those subtle if_start()
related race conditions are back.  For some reason, this is doubly-obvious
with the AR5416 NIC and I don't quite understand why yet.

There's an unrelated issue with AR5416 performance in STA mode (it's
fine in AP mode when bridging frames, weirdly..) that requires a little
further investigation.  Specifically - it works fine on a Lenovo T40
(single core CPU) running a March 2012 9-STABLE kernel, but a Lenovo T60
(dual core) running an early November 2012 kernel behaves very poorly.
The same hardware with an AR9160 or AR9280 behaves perfectly.
2013-02-13 05:32:19 +00:00
..
ath_dfs/null Add a method to explicitly disable radar reporting if required. 2013-01-02 01:36:10 +00:00
ath_hal The encryption type field needs to be preserved for each descriptor 2013-02-09 02:42:01 +00:00
ath_rate I've had some feedback that CCK rates are more reliable than MCS 0 2012-10-31 06:35:50 +00:00
ah_osdep.c Fix the HAL debugging to only use one bit to mark a message as unmaskable. 2012-07-01 02:34:32 +00:00
ah_osdep.h Migrate the ath_hal_filltxdesc() API to take a list of buffer/seglen values. 2012-08-05 10:12:27 +00:00
if_ath.c Pull out the if_transmit() work and revert back to ath_start(). 2013-02-13 05:32:19 +00:00
if_ath_ahb.c Create a new TX lock specifically for queuing frames. 2013-02-07 07:50:16 +00:00
if_ath_alq.c Extend the timestamp to be a timeval, rather than ticks. 2013-02-11 02:48:49 +00:00
if_ath_alq.h Extend the timestamp to be a timeval, rather than ticks. 2013-02-11 02:48:49 +00:00
if_ath_beacon.c Add a quick work-around if ath_beacon_config() to not die if it's called 2013-01-17 16:26:40 +00:00
if_ath_beacon.h Extend the beacon code slightly to support AP mode beaconing for the 2012-08-11 23:26:19 +00:00
if_ath_debug.c TX EDMA debugging fixes: 2012-11-05 07:08:45 +00:00
if_ath_debug.h Add a debug method to dump the EDMA TX status descriptor contents out. 2012-11-03 04:53:44 +00:00
if_ath_keycache.c Don't allocate or program a key for the AR5210. 2012-11-19 23:54:05 +00:00
if_ath_keycache.h Add a 'vap' to ath_keyset(). 2011-11-08 19:25:52 +00:00
if_ath_led.c Bring over the initial 802.11n bluetooth coexistence support code. 2012-06-26 22:16:53 +00:00
if_ath_led.h Refactor out the software LED config code into a common function, called 2011-12-26 05:46:22 +00:00
if_ath_misc.h Pull out the if_transmit() work and revert back to ath_start(). 2013-02-13 05:32:19 +00:00
if_ath_pci.c Create a new TX lock specifically for queuing frames. 2013-02-07 07:50:16 +00:00
if_ath_rx.c Work around some rather unfortunate race conditions inside net80211. 2013-01-31 00:14:25 +00:00
if_ath_rx.h Convert sc_rxpending to a per-EDMA queue, and use that for the legacy code. 2012-07-10 00:02:19 +00:00
if_ath_rx_edma.c Mechanically substitute flags from historic mbuf allocator with 2012-12-04 09:32:43 +00:00
if_ath_rx_edma.h Begin abstracting out the RX path in preparation for RX EDMA support. 2012-07-03 06:59:12 +00:00
if_ath_spectral.c Fix format size. 2013-01-08 22:42:15 +00:00
if_ath_spectral.h Add a new (skeleton) spectral mode manager module. 2013-01-02 03:59:02 +00:00
if_ath_sysctl.c Implement frame (data) transmission using if_transmit(), rather than 2013-01-15 18:01:23 +00:00
if_ath_sysctl.h Break out most of the HAL related tweaks into a per-HAL instance, 2011-06-23 02:38:36 +00:00
if_ath_tdma.c Pull out the debugging code from the critical path and make sure it 2012-11-28 01:55:22 +00:00
if_ath_tdma.h Migrate the TDMA management functions out of if_ath.c into if_ath_tdma.c. 2012-05-20 02:49:42 +00:00
if_ath_tsf.h Migrate the bulk of the RX routines out from if_ath.c to if_ath_rx.[ch]. 2012-05-20 02:05:10 +00:00
if_ath_tx.c Pull out the if_transmit() work and revert back to ath_start(). 2013-02-13 05:32:19 +00:00
if_ath_tx.h ALQ logging enhancements: 2012-11-16 19:57:16 +00:00
if_ath_tx_edma.c Methodize the process of adding the software TX queue to the taskqueue. 2013-02-07 02:15:25 +00:00
if_ath_tx_edma.h Begin separating out the TX DMA setup in preparation for TX EDMA support. 2012-07-23 03:52:18 +00:00
if_ath_tx_ht.c Fix a corner case that I noticed with the AR5416 (and it's currently 2013-02-08 09:07:03 +00:00
if_ath_tx_ht.h Introduce TX aggregation and software TX queue management 2011-11-08 22:43:13 +00:00
if_athdfs.h Add a method to explicitly disable radar reporting if required. 2013-01-02 01:36:10 +00:00
if_athioctl.h Add support for triggering spectral scan upon a channel reset/change. 2013-01-08 22:15:13 +00:00
if_athrate.h Create an ioctl API for fetching the current rate control information. 2012-07-20 01:27:20 +00:00
if_athvar.h Pull out the if_transmit() work and revert back to ath_start(). 2013-02-13 05:32:19 +00:00