Kernel NET Policy Still Being Tackled For Simplified, Better Networking Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 13 September 2016 at 08:57 AM EDT. 1 Comment
HARDWARE
An Intel developer continues working on the "Kernel NET Policy" as a step towards better and simplified network configuration for better performance.

We originally wrote about the Kernel NET Policy proposal back in July while yesterday it was revised by Kan Liang, the Intel developer who originally proposed it this summer.

With the latest version of the patches, the NET policy subsystem is now disabled by default, the queue selection algorithm has been modified, amd there are various other changes. For those failing to remember what this is all about, "NET policy intends to simplify the network configuration and get a good network performance according to the hints(policy) which is applied by user. It provides some typical "policies" for user which can be set per-socket, per-task or per-device. The kernel will automatically figures out how to merge different requests to get good network performance. NET policy is designed for multiqueue network devices. This implementation is only for Intel NICs using i40e driver. But the concepts and generic code should apply to other multiqueue NICs too."

Policies right now include BULK for high throughput, CPU for lower CPU utilization / power-savings, LATENCY for low-latency optimizations, and MIX if multiple kinds of workloads are running on the network device. More details on the latest patches via this kernel mailing list post.
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