e4db5b61c5
Kristian Evensen says: In a project I am involved in, we are running ipsec (Strongswan) on different mt7621-based routers. Each router is configured as an initiator and has around ~30 tunnels to different responders (running on misc. devices). Before the flow cache was removed (kernel 4.9), we got a combined throughput of around 70Mbit/s for all tunnels on one router. However, we recently switched to kernel 4.14 (4.14.48), and the total throughput is somewhere around 57Mbit/s (best-case). I.e., a drop of around 20%. Reverting the flow cache removal restores, as expected, performance levels to that of kernel 4.9. When pcpu xdst exists, it has to be validated first before it can be used. A negative hit thus increases cost vs. no-cache. As number of tunnels increases, hit rate decreases so this pcpu caching isn't a viable strategy. Furthermore, the xdst cache also needs to run with BH off, so when removing this the bh disable/enable pairs can be removed too. Kristian tested a 4.14.y backport of this change and reported increased performance: In our tests, the throughput reduction has been reduced from around -20% to -5%. We also see that the overall throughput is independent of the number of tunnels, while before the throughput was reduced as the number of tunnels increased. Reported-by: Kristian Evensen <kristian.evensen@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de> Signed-off-by: Steffen Klassert <steffen.klassert@secunet.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.