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SubjectRe: QUESTION: can netdev_alloc_skb() errors be reduced by tuning?
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 08:19:33PM -0400, starlight@binnacle.cx wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I submitted testcase for a hugepages bug that has been
> successfully resolved. Have an apparently obscure question
> related to MM, and so I am asking anyone who might have some idea
> on this. Nothing much turned up via Google and digging into
> the KMEM code looks daunting.
>
> Running Intel 82598/ixgbe 10 gig Ethernet under heavy stress.
> Generally is working well after tuning IRQ affinities, but a
> fair number of buffer allocation failures are occurring in the
> 'ixgbe' device driver and are reported via 'ethtool' statistics.
> This may be causing data loss.
>

Can you give an example of an allocation failure? Specifically, I want to
see what sort of allocation it was and what order.

For reliable protocols, an allocation failure should recover and the
data get through but obviously there is a drop in network performance
when this happens.

> The kernel primitive returning the error is netdev_alloc_skb().
>
> Are any tuneable parameters available that can reduce or
> eliminate these allocation failures? Have about eleven
> gigabytes of free memory, though most of that is consumed
> by non-dirty file cache data. Total system memory is 16GB with
> 4GB allocated to hugepages. Zero swap usage and activity though
> swap is enabled. Most application memory is hugepage or is
> 'mlock()'ed.
>

If the allocations are high-order and atomic, increasing min_free_kbytes
can help, particularly in situations where there is a burst of network
traffic. I won't know if they are atomic until I see an error message
though.

> Thank you.
>
>
>
>
>
> System rebooted before test run.
>
> Dual Xeon E5430, 16GB FB-DIMM RAM.
>
>
> $ cat /proc/meminfo
> MemTotal: 16443828 kB
> MemFree: 281176 kB
> Buffers: 53896 kB
> Cached: 11331924 kB
> SwapCached: 0 kB
> Active: 200740 kB
> Inactive: 11284312 kB
> HighTotal: 0 kB
> HighFree: 0 kB
> LowTotal: 16443828 kB
> LowFree: 281176 kB
> SwapTotal: 2031608 kB
> SwapFree: 2031400 kB
> Dirty: 4 kB
> Writeback: 0 kB
> AnonPages: 104464 kB
> Mapped: 14644 kB
> Slab: 440452 kB
> PageTables: 4032 kB
> NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
> Bounce: 0 kB
> CommitLimit: 8156368 kB
> Committed_AS: 122452 kB
> VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
> VmallocUsed: 266872 kB
> VmallocChunk: 34359471043 kB
> HugePages_Total: 2048
> HugePages_Free: 735
> HugePages_Rsvd: 0
> Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
>
>
> # ethtool -S eth2 | egrep -v ': 0$'
> NIC statistics:
> rx_packets: 724246449
> tx_packets: 229847
> rx_bytes: 152691992335
> tx_bytes: 10573426
> multicast: 725997241
> broadcast: 6
> rx_csum_offload_good: 723051776
> alloc_rx_buff_failed: 7119
> tx_queue_0_packets: 229847
> tx_queue_0_bytes: 10573426
> rx_queue_0_packets: 340698332
> rx_queue_0_bytes: 70844299683
> rx_queue_1_packets: 385298923
> rx_queue_1_bytes: 82276167594
>
>
> ixgbe driver fragment
> =====================
> struct sk_buff *skb = netdev_alloc_skb(adapter->netdev, bufsz);
>
> if (!skb) {
> adapter->alloc_rx_buff_failed++;
> goto no_buffers;
> }
>

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab


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