Today I spent quite some hours in spotting some packet drops at Gigabit line rate. Stress-testing the hardware at line-rate reveal a lot of noise and disagreements: it is difficult to determine what really is the source of packet drops. Due to some netperf and perf analysis and some new tracepoints the eyes focus on PCI express bus.

Quite a lot of analysis until that, first I interpreted the raw values as a CPU limitation. E.g. the CPU may not fast enough to keep sk_buff’s to the adapter. Adjusting the interrupt rate or adjusting the RX/TX ring buffer size are adequate actions, but as I indicated, the CPU was not the limiting factor in the end.

I started to adjust the e1000e driver with some PCI driver modification to set the maximum read request size. I hope I can provide some graphs tomorrow for 1 byte packets and Ethernet Jumbo Frames.