virtio-net: Introduce a new bottom half packet TX

Based on a patch from Mark McLoughlin, this patch introduces a new
bottom half packet transmitter that avoids the latency imposed by
the tx_timer approach.  Rather than scheduling a timer when a TX
packet comes in, schedule a bottom half to be run from the iothread.
The bottom half handler first attempts to flush the queue with
notification disabled (this is where we could race with a guest
without txburst).  If we flush a full burst, reschedule immediately.
If we send short of a full burst, try to re-enable notification.
To avoid a race with TXs that may have occurred, we must then
flush again.  If we find some packets to send, the guest it probably
active, so we can reschedule again.

tx_timer and tx_bh are mutually exclusive, so we can re-use the
tx_waiting flag to indicate one or the other needs to be setup.
This allows us to seamlessly migrate between timer and bh TX
handling.

The bottom half handler becomes the new default and we add a new
tx= option to virtio-net-pci.  Usage:

-device virtio-net-pci,tx=timer # select timer mitigation vs "bh"

Signed-off-by: Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/hw/virtio-net.h b/hw/virtio-net.h
index a2d1545e4c..8af9a1ce55 100644
--- a/hw/virtio-net.h
+++ b/hw/virtio-net.h
@@ -60,6 +60,7 @@ typedef struct virtio_net_conf
 {
     uint32_t txtimer;
     int32_t txburst;
+    char *tx;
 } virtio_net_conf;
 
 /* Maximum packet size we can receive from tap device: header + 64k */