Wire-speed and beyond, oh wait

A recent twitter post by Chris Samuel ‏@chris_bloke pointed out some optimizations in Linux networking. Over at LWN.net there is an article explaining Bulk network packet transmission. The comments are worth reading as well, including this blog post by Jesper Dangaard Brouer.

From the LWN article:

Every time a packet is transmitted over the network, a sequence of operations must be performed. These include acquiring the lock for the queue of outgoing packets, passing a packet to the driver, putting the packet in the device's transmit queue, and telling the device to start transmitting. Some of those operations are inherently per-packet, but others are not. The acquisition of the queue lock could be amortized across multiple packet transmissions, for example, and the act of telling the device to start transmission may be expensive indeed. It can involve hardware operations or, even, on some systems, hypervisor calls.

Often, when there is one packet to transmit, there are others waiting in the queue as well; network traffic can be inherently bursty. So it would make sense for the networking stack to try to split the fixed costs of starting packet transmission across as many packets as possible. Some techniques, such as segmentation offload (wherein the network interface splits large chunks of data into packets) perform that kind of batching. But, in current kernels, if the networking stack has a set of packets ready to go, they will be sent out the slow way, one at a time.

And, they paid attention to latency issues.

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