A change in a series of VLAN-related changes appears to have
inadvertently disabled the use of the scatter gather feature of
network cards for transmission of non-IP ethernet protocols like ATA
over Ethernet (AoE). Below is a reference to the commit that
introduces a "harmonize_features" function that turns off scatter
gather when the NIC does not support hardware checksumming for the
ethernet protocol of an sk buff.
commit f01a5236bd
Author: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
Date: Sun Jan 9 06:23:31 2011 +0000
net offloading: Generalize netif_get_vlan_features().
The can_checksum_protocol function is not equipped to consider a
protocol that does not require checksumming. Calling it for a
protocol that requires no checksum is inappropriate.
The patch below has harmonize_features call can_checksum_protocol when
the protocol needs a checksum, so that the network layer is not forced
to perform unnecessary skb linearization on the transmission of AoE
packets. Unnecessary linearization results in decreased performance
and increased memory pressure, as reported here:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg15184.html
The problem has probably not been widely experienced yet, because
only recently has the kernel.org-distributed aoe driver acquired the
ability to use payloads of over a page in size, with the patchset
recently included in the mm tree:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/8/28/140
The coraid.com-distributed aoe driver already could use payloads of
greater than a page in size, but its users generally do not use the
newest kernels.
Signed-off-by: Ed Cashin <ecashin@coraid.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
c0d680e577