The interesting new thing here is AQL, the Airtime Queue Limit
patchset from Kan Yan (Google) and Toke Høiland-Jørgensen (Redhat).
The effect is intended to eventually be similar to BQL, but byte
queue limits are not useful in wifi where the actual throughput can
vary by around 4 orders of magnitude. There are more details in the
patches themselves.
mac80211: Use Airtime-based Queue Limits (AQL) on packet dequeue
The previous commit added the ability to throttle stations when they queue
too much airtime in the hardware. This commit enables the functionality by
calculating the expected airtime usage of each packet that is dequeued from
the TXQs in mac80211, and accounting that as pending airtime.
The estimated airtime for each skb is stored in the tx_info, so we can
subtract the same amount from the running total when the skb is freed or
recycled. The throttling mechanism relies on this accounting to be
accurate (i.e., that we are not freeing skbs without subtracting any
airtime they were accounted for), so we put the subtraction into
ieee80211_report_used_skb(). As an optimisation, we also subtract the
airtime on regular TX completion, zeroing out the value stored in the
packet afterwards, to avoid having to do an expensive lookup of the station
from the packet data on every packet.
This patch does *not* include any mechanism to wake a throttled TXQ again,
on the assumption that this will happen anyway as a side effect of whatever
freed the skb (most commonly a TX completion).
Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@redhat.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20191119060610.76681-5-kyan@google.com
Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
3 files changed
