[Make-wifi-fast] [RFC/RFT] mac80211: Switch to a virtual time-based airtime scheduler

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at redhat.com> writes:

> This switches the airtime scheduler in mac80211 to use a virtual time-based
> scheduler instead of the round-robin scheduler used before. This has a
> couple of advantages:
>
> - No need to sync up the round-robin scheduler in firmware/hardware with
>   the round-robin airtime scheduler.
>
> - If several stations are eligible for transmission we can schedule both of
>   them; no need to hard-block the scheduling rotation until the head of the
>   queue has used up its quantum.
>
> - The check of whether a station is eligible for transmission becomes
>   simpler (in ieee80211_txq_may_transmit()).
>
> The drawback is that scheduling becomes slightly more expensive, as we need
> to maintain an rbtree of TXQs sorted by virtual time. This means that
> ieee80211_register_airtime() becomes O(logN) in the number of currently
> scheduled TXQs. However, hopefully this number rarely grows too big (it's
> only TXQs currently backlogged, not all associated stations), so it
> shouldn't be too big of an issue.
>
> Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at redhat.com>
> ---
> This is basically the idea I mentioned earlier for a different way to
> handle the airtime scheduling.
>
> I've tested it on ath9k, where it achieves the same fairness and
> weighing properties as the old scheduler. It would be good if you could
> test it on your ath10k setup, Rajkumar; and all of you please comment on
> whether you agree that this is better from an API point of view.

So no one has any comments on this? :)

-Toke