@@ -36,6 +36,47 @@ Parameters
The latter allows for bandwidth higher than external port speed
when looping back traffic between VFs. Works with 8x10G and 4x25G
cards.
+ * - ``tx_scheduling_layers``
+ - permanent
+ - The ice hardware uses hierarchical scheduling for Tx with a fixed
+ number of layers in the scheduling tree. Root node is representing a
+ port, while all the leaves represents the queues. This way of
+ configuring Tx scheduler allows features like DCB or devlink-rate
+ (documented below) for fine-grained configuration how much BW is given
+ to any given queue or group of queues, as scheduling parameters can be
+ configured at any given layer of the tree. By default 9-layer tree
+ topology was deemed best for most workloads, as it gives optimal
+ performance to configurability ratio. However for some specific cases,
+ this might not be the case. A great example would be sending traffic to
+ queues that is not a multiple of 8. Since in 9-layer topology maximum
+ number of children is limited to 8, the 9th queue has a different parent
+ than the rest, and it's given more BW credits. This causes a problem
+ when the system is sending traffic to 9 queues:
+
+ | tx_queue_0_packets: 24163396
+ | tx_queue_1_packets: 24164623
+ | tx_queue_2_packets: 24163188
+ | tx_queue_3_packets: 24163701
+ | tx_queue_4_packets: 24163683
+ | tx_queue_5_packets: 24164668
+ | tx_queue_6_packets: 23327200
+ | tx_queue_7_packets: 24163853
+ | tx_queue_8_packets: 91101417 < Too much traffic is sent to 9th
+
+ Sometimes this might be a big concern, so the idea is to empower the
+ user to switch to 5-layer topology, enabling performance gains but
+ sacrificing configurability for features like DCB and devlink-rate.
+
+ This parameter gives user flexibility to choose the 5-layer transmit
+ scheduler topology. After switching parameter reboot is required for
+ the feature to start working.
+
+ User could choose 9 (the default) or 5 as a value of parameter, e.g.:
+ $ devlink dev param set pci/0000:16:00.0 name tx_scheduling_layers
+ value 5 cmode permanent
+
+ And verify that value has been set:
+ $ devlink dev param show pci/0000:16:00.0 name tx_scheduling_layers
Info versions
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