bnx2: Remove some unnecessary smp_mb() in tx fast path.

smp_mb() inside bnx2_tx_avail() is used twice in the normal
bnx2_start_xmit() path (see illustration below).  The full memory
barrier is only necessary during race conditions with tx completion.
We can speed up the tx path by replacing smp_mb() in bnx2_tx_avail()
with a compiler barrier.  The compiler barrier is to force the
compiler to fetch the tx_prod and tx_cons from memory.

In the race condition between bnx2_start_xmit() and bnx2_tx_int(),
we have the following situation:

bnx2_start_xmit()                       bnx2_tx_int()
    if (!bnx2_tx_avail())
            BUG();

    ...

    if (!bnx2_tx_avail())
            netif_tx_stop_queue();          update_tx_index();
            smp_mb();                       smp_mb();
            if (bnx2_tx_avail())            if (netif_tx_queue_stopped() &&
                    netif_tx_wake_queue();      bnx2_tx_avail())

With smp_mb() removed from bnx2_tx_avail(), we need to add smp_mb() to
bnx2_start_xmit() as shown above to properly order netif_tx_stop_queue()
and bnx2_tx_avail() to check the ring index.  If it is not strictly
ordered, the tx queue can be stopped forever.

This improves performance by about 5% with 2 ports running bi-directional
64-byte packets.

Reviewed-by: Benjamin Li <benli@broadcom.com>
Reviewed-by: Matt Carlson <mcarlson@broadcom.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Chan <mchan@broadcom.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

diff --git a/drivers/net/bnx2.c b/drivers/net/bnx2.c
index d44ecc30865f576cd5897452957e35e120db395c..2af570d7a2fb4637a5ba609088ad7eb90f9320cf 100644 (file)
--- a/drivers/net/bnx2.c
+++ b/drivers/net/bnx2.c
@@ -253,7 +253,8 @@ static inline u32 bnx2_tx_avail(struct bnx2 *bp, struct bnx2_tx_ring_info *txr)
 {
        u32 diff;
 
-       smp_mb();
+       /* Tell compiler to fetch tx_prod and tx_cons from memory. */
+       barrier();
 
        /* The ring uses 256 indices for 255 entries, one of them
         * needs to be skipped.
@@ -6534,6 +6535,13 @@ bnx2_start_xmit(struct sk_buff *skb, struct net_device *dev)
 
        if (unlikely(bnx2_tx_avail(bp, txr) <= MAX_SKB_FRAGS)) {
                netif_tx_stop_queue(txq);
+
+               /* netif_tx_stop_queue() must be done before checking
+                * tx index in bnx2_tx_avail() below, because in
+                * bnx2_tx_int(), we update tx index before checking for
+                * netif_tx_queue_stopped().
+                */
+               smp_mb();
                if (bnx2_tx_avail(bp, txr) > bp->tx_wake_thresh)
                        netif_tx_wake_queue(txq);
        }