[Make-wifi-fast] [RFC 1/3] mac80211: Add TXQ scheduling API

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Johannes Berg <johannes at sipsolutions.net> writes:

> On Tue, 2017-10-10 at 19:51 +0200, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
>
>> > > +	struct list_head active_txqs;
>> > > +	spinlock_t active_txq_lock;
>> > 
>> > Is there much point in having a separate lock? We probably need the
>> > fq lock in most places related to this anyway?
>> 
>> Well, once the scheduler gets a bit smarter it may be necessary to
>> much with the order of TXQs on there without touching any of the
>> queues (e.g., when calculating airtime usage on TX and RX
>> completion). Not sure if that is enough to warrant a separate lock,
>> though; I hadn't thought about just grabbing fq->lock...
>
> Ok, dunno. It seemed sort of related but perhaps it's not really.

Yeah. I'll keep this in mind when I implement the airtime fairness
accounting.

>> > Also maybe you should only do that if the TXQ isn't *empty*, so the
>> > driver could call this unconditionally?
>> 
>> There can be cases where the driver wants the queue to be scheduled
>> even though it looks empty from mac80211's point of view. For ath9k,
>> the driver keeps its retry queue in the drv_priv part of the txq
>> structure, so it will check if that is empty before deciding to call
>> the schedule function.
>> 
>> This is also related to the PS behaviour, so guess this could be
>> changed once that is all TXQ-based...
>
> Interesting. I guess scheduling an empty queue doesn't really matter
> for mac80211 anyway though - just some extra work if we try to get
> frames from it.

Yes, and I figure giving the driver that option might be a good way to
have some flexibility.

-Toke